D'you wanna come with me?
by LunaStorm
Summary: In which the Doctor end up in interesting places and meets some interesting people; Daniel takes weirdness in stride; Sherlock deduces aliens to tears; Harry finds trouble unerringly and Jack finds rum just as easily. Par for the course, really. WARNING: this is a multicrossover and will span over several fandoms.
1. Cause if you do, I should warn you

**_'Cause if you do, I should warn you..._**

The desert sun was a lot harsher than Daniel had expected and his allergy to journeys was playing up badly, but the site was worth all the hassle.

A royal necropolis on the west bank of the Nile, with two of the oldest, largest and best preserved pyramids in Egypt, dating back over four and a half millennia! From the moment he'd first seen the outlines of the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid on the horizon, during the brief trip from Saqqara, he'd known that it held everything he'd dreamed of and more.

In the half-hour they'd been here, among the excavated features of the distant past, he'd realized that neither the excruciating hot temperatures nor the persistent dust being blown everywhere by the surprisingly strong wind meant anything to him: this was a paradise.

Sturdy white tents criss-crossed the area and he watched with undisguised envy the number of pale-shrouded archaeologists from all over the world that were allowed to actually work on the field, rather than just stroll through it like the tourists. Oh, how he wished he'd been able to convince someone – anyone, really – to include him in the dig. Any dig. Better still, to fund one of his own!

Sadly, that was likely to remain a wishful dream. The scientific community was determinedly blind and no effort on his part got him anywhere except as a joke. Even Dr. Jordan was outright dismissive of his theories.

Daniel sighed bitterly.

It hurt, being treated like nothing more than a delusional fool. There were far too many of those to be found in every corner of the Earth – Daniel could attest to that: only two days before, on the plane, he'd had to listen to a bloke earnestly going on and on about mysterious time wars and travelling with an alien lord or something. And about wishing desperately to find him again.

The poor bloke had looked perfectly normal in his framed glasses, with a very sensible square face and slightly receding haircut; but he'd sounded like the sad drunkards prone to con the next beer from credulous tourists with stories of alien kidnappings, or one of those weirdos on fanatics-funded broadcasts raving about angels roaming the Earth.

And Daniel hadn't found anything better to say than a lame: "Well, you could always write it all down and send it to ABC. They might take it as a sci-fi script, if nothing else... you'd make some money, at least."

He'd been more acidly dismissive than he usually was, but the bloke hadn't minded; instead, his eyes had lit up with a firework of possibilities and he'd started muttering to himself: "And I could fund further research on the matter... private research... but it would have to be... perhaps... yes, after all, why not?..." He'd kept stroking the bulky watch strapped to his wrist all through the rest of the flight and for some reason, it had unnerved Daniel.

Though he could admit that what had disturbed him the most had been realizing the very real possibility that _that_ might end up being _his_ fate after all. Except he probably wouldn't even have success with it. He could just see himself walking dejectedly into a bookshop and finding a pile of copies of _The Truth About the Pyramids_ by D. Jackson being sold at a 70% discount in the bargain section. It would probably have an horribly gaudy cover, too, he'd bet.

But no! He couldn't afford to think like that. He was right, he knew he was. He just needed a chance to prove it; and sooner or later, he _would_ get that chance.

He sighed again.

His hands were itching to run along the beautiful stony hieroglyphs describing King Sneferu's military incursion in Libya, which their coarse guide was just then translating. Wrongly. Not by much, admittedly, but he was still wrong. Daniel closed his eyes for a long moment, pained.

He fell behind and did his best to tune everything of the present out and fill his eyes and mind with the bounty of history and culture that sandy, dusty corner of the world was offering so generously.

Their guide started shouting after a while, to gather them for the return trip, but Daniel ignored him. He only had a week here – couldn't afford anything more, nor was it likely that he could save up enough for another trip anytime soon; he had no intention of wasting his time. If he managed, he planned on avoiding even sleep. He was going to enjoy. Every. Last. Second.

He wandered off, naturally drawn to the less touristy areas and poured all his focus on the wealth of half-erased inscriptions that dotted the valley temple site. Maybe, just maybe he should consider compromising with the rest of the scholars about his theories. He knew he was right, but oh! To be allowed to work on these digs! He was never going to get his wish if he stuck to his convictions, losing all credibility in the face of those blind fools who, unfortunately, controlled most of the funds for his field of study. Maybe he should just give up.

He caught sight of a half-hidden, partly collapsed wall with an unexpected combination of symbols – the metonymic logograph for 'traveler' with the determinative for 'god' – and ducked under a rope held by battered delimitation columns, careless of the mistreatment he was inflicting to his already worn out clothes.

Everything faded into irrelevance around him as he lost himself into the joy of translation, slowly moving farther and farther away from the officially approved paths, following the trail of information recorded four thousand years earlier...

Out of the blue, a series of weird, wheezing noises started up right behind the wall Daniel was studying, startling him out of his focused reverie: like a crescendo of trumpeting of elephants, getting louder until they stopped with an unexpected thud.

Completely flabbergasted, Daniel moved slowly around the corner, peering out to whatever had made those strange sounds.

What he saw made him take off his glasses and frantically clean them with the dusty hem of his shirt, all the while blinking owlishly at the big blue box that most likely was not supposed to be there.

It looked like the back of a British telephone box, only blue. And it was kind of squished between two ancient walls. Looking _completely_ out of place.

Putting his glasses back on, and distractedly noticing that he'd accomplished nothing except making it even harder to see anything, what with the sand now smeared all over the lenses, Daniel tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

There was a loud bang, followed by a crash, then more clangs and clanks, and finally a dull thud.

Daniel hurried to the... blue telephone box... if that was what it was... and pushed himself into the narrow space between it and the nearest wall, squeezing himself until he managed to pass through, even though he had to sacrifice his waistcoat, whose many pockets had got wedged on the edge of the box and the wall.

On the other side, a tall man with close-cropped hair and jug ears was getting to his feet: he wore a plain leather jacket, dark trousers and black leather boots and looked utterly normal and utterly out of place at the same time.

By the looks of it, a temporary wall had collapsed on him and dragged down an entire cupboard on top, spilling catalogued fragments of artefacts all over the place.

Daniel blinked, stunned to find himself in the back storage area of the valley temple's temporary museum, where the remnants of the mudbrick houses of the priests of Sneferu's mortuary cult were being catalogued and stored against the enclosure wall. How had he got there?

Come to think of it, the light was a lot more reddish and the air a lot more stifling than it had been just a moment ago... it was just a moment ago, right? Admittedly it looked like sunset was close, but... surely not?

The man dusted himself off brusquely, then checked the black wristwatch strapped to his wrist and glanced at his surroundings critically. "Hmm... it seems I'm a little further away than I'd aimed for," he said with a British accent. "Not too much, though. That's good."

He looked up and smiled at Daniel winningly.

"Who are you?" asked Daniel rather stupidly.

"I'm the Doctor!" was the perky reply. "Who are _you_?"

"Dr. Daniel Jackson," he replied automatically. "Sorry, Doctor who?"

"Just the Doctor," the weird man answered cheerfully.

Daniel's gaze went from him to the telephone box – and yes, it was just that: there was even writing on top of it, saying 'Police Public Call Box'. It was unbelievable.

Daniel's gaze roamed over the square lines of its design, so oddly familiar...

"Hold on!" he cried out, astonished. "I- I've seen this before!"

The Doctor raised an eyebrow: "Really? That's interesting. I don't remember meeting you before. Maybe I've yet to."

Daniel swung his head back to stare at the man: "What?"

"Oh, you know. Sometimes I meet a person when he or she has already met me. Hazards of travelling in time, I guess."

Daniel repeated in shock: "Traveling in time?"

"I imagine sometime in one of my futures I'll meet you in your past, then. Something to look forward to!" the weird man finished with a huge grin.

"No; no no no no. That. But. You. That. I-" Daniel ran a hand through his longish brown hair, feeling out of his depth. He took a deep breath, trying to find some coherence: "This makes no sense," he murmured. "No sense at all. _Who are you?_"

The man frowned: "I thought you said you'd seen my Tardis already."

_Tardis_, mouthed Daniel, gaping. Then he blinked at the man's deepening frown: "No, I mean... not _seen_ seen, just... seen it."

"You're the one who's not making any sense now."

"Huh. Right. Right." Daniel ran his hand through his hair again. "I- I mean I saw _something_ on a cartouche, among hieroglyphs. Something absurd. It didn't make any sense, but I- I think maybe, now it does. Because. Right. I- I suspect it was... _this._" He gestured to the blue box.

The man – the Doctor? – raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms.

Daniel grabbed him by an elbow and dragged him away: "Here, come. Come have a look. It was just... this... way... There!"

And there it was indeed: an undoubtedly authentic sculpted hieroglyph of an undoubtedly anachronistic phone box.

"This... this hasn't been related to any other hieroglyph ever found, I remember reading about it, didn't even know it was here. Heh." Daniel looked at the strange shape with fondness and wonder. "It's incredible. It's simply not explainable. Most scholars just think it's a hoax, never mind the radiocarbon dating. But I knew there had to be more... Oh, some other egyptologysts have tried to come up with theories, but nothing makes sense, especially in the context it's put in – see here? It's in a list of 'treasures' for the temple, included in the narration about a 'traveler god', of whom there is no trace in Egyptian mythology I might add, and 'war machines' that-"

"Yes, yes. I was there, you know, I don't need a blow-by-blow account," said the Doctor irritatedly. His gaze was dark and sad.

"You were there..." breathed Daniel. "So it's true. What you were saying. It's impossible, but it's true. You... you travel in time!" He put a hand over his mouth, beyond shocked – and just a tiny bit delighted. "And this!" He pointed back to the mysterious hieroglyph, his enthusiasm growing. "This is real. It's your... whatever you called it, isn't it? It really is. I knew it had to be a representation of a thing, not a concept... the Egyptian writing system has always included a combination of both alphabetic and logographic elements, you know, and..."

"Yes, yes, it's the Tardis," murmured the Doctor, sounding tired all of a sudden. "Odd, though. I didn't think I'd made such an impression. Not until much later, at least – I don't remember ever visiting Ancient Egypt again... not until the New Kingdom period, anyway. I was never very comfortable with the Old and Intermediate Dynasties," he explained with a slight grimace. "All those alien gods."

"What? Wait- _what_?!" Daniel's eyes were bugging out.

The Doctor shook his head disapprovingly: "I simply can't stand aliens posing as gods. They make me nervous. Because of Sutekh, you know," he said in confidence. "Which reminds me!"

He snapped his head up and sprinted away.

Daniel was left gaping after him for a long moment before he managed to break through his shock and run after the mystifying time traveller.

"Wait. Wait! You can't just run off like this!"

"Yes I can!" the Doctor shouted over his shoulder. "Look. This is me, running off. See ya!"

"But, but... but!" Daniel started running after the strange man. "Wait! Wait, please! You have to- look, can you just stop a moment?" he panted.

The Doctor slowed down and turned with a very put-upon expression: "What is it?" he asked, starting to walk nonchalantly backwards.

Out of breath, Daniel attempted to put into words the exhilarated thoughts that were threatening to make him burst with excitement: "Your... thing! It's a- a phone box! And, and- it's blue, _and_ it was depicted in a hieroglyphic text!"

"It wasn't blue in the depiction," pointed out the Doctor unhelpfully.

"You said the ancient gods were aliens!" cried Daniel.

The Doctor stopped, wavered, grimaced, then admitted: "I... did, yes. Yes, I said so." A pause. "You don't have to listen."

"I knew it!" Daniel shouted his triumph to the universe. "This is the proof! I was right!" He laughed in pure glee. "I was right about everything! Ha! Ha ha ha ha!"

The Doctor started marching briskly away again.

"No, wait. Wait!" Daniel ran after him. "You can't just walk away – that's not fair. You've gotta tell me what's going on."

"No I don't."

"But this, this ties in with my theories perfectly! Don't you understand! _I was right!_"

"Good for you!"

"I told them, I _told_ them that the Pyramids of Giza are much older than the third millennium B.C. ..."

"'Course they are."

Daniel gaped: "You... you believe me?"

"Why wouldn't I?" asked the Doctor distractedly. He found a Jeep in the employee parking and deftly took out something metal from a pocket of his leather jacket. It glowed for a moment and the car lock sprang.

Daniel ran around to the other door and slammed his hands on the window, positively vibrating with excitement: "With your help, I could get the scientific community to _listen_ to me!"

"Sorry, I'm a bit busy at the moment."

"Please!" shouted Daniel, aware that he was sounding desperate. "You're the proof that I'm not delusional!"

The Doctor's eyebrows raised again.

"The entire scientific world thinks I'm deluded, they're ostracising me, saying I'm a madman, but I know, I _know_ I'm right, there are proofs of cross-pollination of ancient cultures everywhere if you just _look_ and now you're confirming my idea that the pyramids were actually landing sites for alien spaceships and this is beyond fantastic and _you can't go away like that!_"

Daniel ran out of steam, panting, but he'd managed to capture the attention of the Doctor, who gave him a sudden look of concentration: "Hold on a mo'," he said. "Did you say Daniel Jackson?"

"Yeah. That's. Um. That's me," replied Daniel, straightening up and fidgeting a little.

The Doctor's eyes widened with pleased surprise: "Daniel Jackson!" he repeated with growing enthusiasm. "_Doctor_ Daniel Jackson! The foremost expert in ancient languages and history on Planet Earth! Egyptologist, archaeologist, historian, and of course, renowned terrestrial and extraterrestrial linguist... The person responsible for deciphering and unlocking the Stargate for the United States Air Force!"

The Doctor was now grinning in delight and looking at Daniel like a fan meeting a celebrity.

"I'm... all that?" Daniel asked, incredulous and hopeful at once.

"Well." The Doctor returned serious abruptly. "You will be. Possibly. Hopefully. See ya!"

He wrenched the car door open and climbed swiftly inside.

Without a second thought, Daniel threw himself after him and fastened his seatbelt under the Doctor's irritated gaze: "I'm coming with you," he declared, more bravely than he felt.

The time traveller rolled his eyes: "Why is it that you humans must always run head first into the unknown?"

Daniel found himself gaping again: "You... humans?"

The Doctor powered up the car and started to manoeuvre it: "Yes, I'm an alien. Problem?"

He nearly backed them into a wall, then almost ran over a rubbish bin when he reversed direction.

Daniel grabbed the seat with both hands, holding his breath, but shook his head vehemently: "You're the one with the answers I seek, I don't care what galaxy you come from."

"And what makes you think I'll give you any of those answers?"

The Doctor sped up, apparently disregarding both the actual road and any obstacles on their path, only ever swerving to avoid them at the very last minute. Daniel valiantly fought down a whimper at his slipshod driving.

"For that matter, why do you need my help?" he asked, frowning at Daniel and, incidentally, not paying much attention to where he was driving.

They got onto the road, by the looks of it by chance, and darted away far above whatever speed limit there might have been for it.

Daniel sagged against the seat with a defeated sigh: "Let's just say that my theory finds little acceptance in the academic world and leave it at that," he said, thinking bitterly of the ridicule that his colleagues usually reserved for him.

"Current."

"What?"

"In the _current_ academic world. Give it... oh... 100 years or so, and no-one will doubt you at all."

"That's not very comforting."

The Doctor beamed a too-bright smile at him and steered abruptly to control the suddenly skidding Jeep, thrusting Daniel against the door.

The archaeologist grimaced, but doggedly forged on: "Tell me more."

"I'm not sure I should. Terrible thing, meddling with timelines. Knowing too much could kill you. Change the course of history for the worst. Destroy the entire universe. Who knows?"

"Are you always this catastrophic?"

"Well, I admit that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction could be limited to the human race."

The Doctor darted a glance at Daniel and smirked.

"But you've already told me so much. What difference will it make?" pleaded the archaeologist.

Sighing with impatience, the Doctor sped up even more and tried a different approach: "You don't need any help. You figured it all out on your own, didn't you? How did you come up with that theory anyway?"

And just like that, Daniel was off onto a lengthy lecture, explaining in detail everything he'd observed, conjectured, deduced and hoped.

He trailed off when he realized the Doctor was parking the car with a noisy skid. "...Where are we?"

"See that?" The weird man pointed to a squat building complex hunkered down around an unremarkable hill on which Daniel's expert eye could spot some discreet, but clear, signs of Egyptian architecture. The settlement had an undefinable area of military.

"Yeah?" he asked, a bit uncomfortable.

"That is what I came to check."

The Doctor got out of the Jeep and strolled up to the barred entry gate as if he owned it.

Daniel hurried after him: "Hold on, we can't get in there, we don't have permission!" he hissed urgently.

"Don't we?" asked the Doctor in mock surprise. He marched straight up to the military-looking guard and showed off a flap of black leather which presumably contained a paper: "I'm the Doctor and this is my assistant," he announced authoritatively.

Daniel tried not to let his jaw fall in shock.

The uniformed guard took the paper, studied it carefully, then nodded and motioned them through.

The Doctor moved with the determination of someone who knew exactly where he was going.

Daniel hastily followed, eyes wide and dazed: "How did you do that? How could you _possibly_ do that? This site is under control of the military, you can't possibly have done that!" He caught up with the Doctor. "Did you bribe them? Is that it? Was there money in the folds of that paper?"

"What? No! How did you come up with that idea?" asked the Doctor, genuinely scandalized.

"But you got us in!"

"So I did."

"But it's impossible! You couldn't possibly be allowed here. _I'm_ certainly not allowed here!"

But the Doctor was already entering an excavated tunnel on the side of the hill and Daniel could only follow him downwards, in thick darkness only pierced by the small torch the time traveller was now holding up.

From what the archaeologist could see, it was a very typical burial site, all dark tunnels and small, barely decorated chambers. Daniel was torn between the violent desire to _stay_ and study every detail for hours on end, and the irresistible pull to follow the mystifying alien and find out what he was doing.

The mystery that was the Doctor won and Daniel found himself half-running to keep up with his loping strides, plunging ever deeper into that darkness he itched to explore and fast reaching what had to be the underground chamber.

The Doctor turned his small torch to the ground, quickly darting the light around until he found some cables and with a soft "Aha!" he blared the unexpectedly whirring thing at them, evidently jury-rigging them because his action triggered a few electric lamps, obviously left behind by whoever was studying the place.

Daniel gasped in awe.

The murals on the walls of the room could not be seen clearly in the shadows, but his breath was taken by what filled the other side of the chamber almost to his ceiling: an enormous, black basalt statue of the jackal-headed god on a throne; Seth in all his magnificence.

The Doctor went instantly to work, starting to pass his torch-thing slowly along the outline of the door and then moving to do the same to the sarcophagus at the feet of the statue. Only, it didn't look much like a torch anymore: there was a sort of bluish laser pulse on it and it was emitting a soft buzzing sound.

The archaeologist considered asking about it for half a second, but history had a greater call on him than whatever alien technology that might be. "Where are we?" he whispered, enthralled.

The Doctor turned to him with gleaming, eager eyes: "This, Doctor Jackson, is the burial chamber of Sutekh; or, was, rather. It's what remains of it." He returned to his examination and tossed over his shoulder: " We're in the lower levels of the Black Pyramid, in case you're wondering."

"There is no Black Pyramid," blurted out Daniel automatically.

The Doctor grinned in an extremely self-satisfied way: "Not anymore."

Then he returned to his perusal of the sarcophagus, crouching low and muttering to himself.

Daniel shook his head and tried a different line of questioning, his hand running along the stone reverently without much conscious thought: "Sutekh... In ancient Egyptian mythology, Sutekh is one of the many names for Set, the god of the deserts," he pointed out.

"Oh! Yes, I suppose it was," was the rather distracted reply. "He travelled a lot, that one. Gathered quite a few names while at it: Set, Setesh, Sadok, the Typhonian Beast, simply Typhon... But the Osirian one was Sutekh."

The Doctor stood up with a pleased grunt and fiddled with his not-torch, dimming the laser light. The soft buzzing noise returned with a vengeance.

"Sutekh the Destroyer, that's what his own people called him," he went on explaining. "Very paranoid. He was convinced that all forms of life might one day challenge his hegemony and feared them for it."

"What, _all_ forms of life?"

"Yes. All. So he decided to destroy all life in the universe. Very logical, when you think of it." The Doctor stopped, a thoughtful expression on his face: "Also completely unacceptable, of course."

Daniel regarded him warily: "What is it that you're looking for in Sutekh's tomb?"

"Well, when I say tomb..." The Doctor turned to him and Daniel got the distinct impression that the mad alien was having a lot of fun. "Prison might be a better word."

"But that's a sarcophagus. You get those in tombs, not prisons," the scholar protested.

"The problem with sarcophagi is that they can hide just about anything! A Sontaran cloning device... a Goa'uld healing device... a nuclear power plant..."

"What?" asked Daniel in a strangled voice.

The Doctor contemplated the statue thoughtfully: "_Or_, an Osirian lodestone..."

"What's a lodestone?" asked Daniel, feeling weak in the knees (a part of him was still wondering about nuclear plants in sarcophagi).

"A type of technology used by the Osirians to travel through time," was the matter-of-fact answer.

Daniel nodded, pretending with all his forces that he wasn't completely out of his depth: "Like your... Tardis?"

"No, not really. Lodestones have a 1:1 ratio between the distance in time travelled and the time experienced for the traveller, as far as I know no other people ever invented something like this. Of course, not many species live thousands of years like the Osirians. Ageing 70 years to go back in time 70 years wouldn't have mattered much to them. _I _call it _boring_."

Finished with passing his not-torch over every available surface edge, the Doctor stood back abruptly; the metal stick vanished into a pocket of his leather jacket.

"They're tricky things, lodestones," he said lightly. "Last time I was here, one of those sent my Tardis completely off course. Mind, they're occasionally useful too..."

"And they are hidden in Egyptian sarcophagi?" asked Daniel tentatively.

"Well, those around here are. Except when they're activated, they lose their stone form and become visible doorways." The Doctor gesticulated to underline his explanation: "Entrances into a time space tunnel, with energy spiralling in their form. It's rather beautiful to see. Like the materialization of a complex mathematical concept. Osirians truly were an amazing species, when it came to mathematics."

Unable to contain himself any longer, Daniel blurted out: "Ok, look. What, exactly, do you mean by 'Osirians'?"

"I mean that they came from the planet Phaester Osiris."

"Right."

"They were a powerful race, the Osirians," mused the Doctor. "Very advanced psychic powers: mental and physical projection, mind control, telepathy... they particularly liked puzzles. Arrogant bastards, most of them, but _much_ more pleasant than the species that succeeded them as the dominant species of the Milky Way galaxy."

Daniel's eyes bugged out: "So... so they came from a... a different galaxy?"

"Originally, yes. They liked this one, though."

"That's..." Daniel swallowed a few times.

The Doctor sighed: "Incredible? Impossible? Delusional? Couldn't you try and be a little more original?"

"...very far from here."

"Oh." The Doctor blinked. "Guess you could."

After an awkward pause, Daniel tried again: "If what you say is true, how did Sutekh end up _here_ of all places?"

The Doctor beamed unnervingly: "He annihilated his home planet and left a trail of destruction across half the galaxy, exterminating all living things he encountered," he said cheerfully. "He was pursued across the galaxy by his brother and the other seven hundred forty surviving Osirians, until he was finally defeated by their combined might. Here, as it were. Isn't it fantastic?"

Faltering in the face of the enormity of all this, Daniel fell back onto familiar ground and started reciting: "In early Egypt, Set was the brother of Horus, Isis, Nephthys..."

"Who was also his wife, yes," interrupted the Doctor. "Quite typical in Osirian's society."

"Really?" frowned Daniel, momentarily derailed.

The Doctor didn't pay him any mind: "She was nearly as nasty as him, I'm told. Never met her, though."

"It was all true, then? All the myths? They were all just alien stories?"

"Pretty much. The tales of the Osirians were remembered in Egyptian mythology for generations. And then they were taken over by the Goa'uld."

"The who?"

The Doctor looked at him, appearing startled for a moment, and then gave him an unconvincing bright smile: "Oh, never mind that. Come have a look, instead. What does this look like to you?"

Feeling as if he was walking in an unsettling dream, Daniel slowly drew nearer and tried to see what 'this' was.

The Doctor leaned down and picked up a fragment of an octagonal stone coin with an unrecognisable pattern on it: "Interesting," he muttered. He looked at Daniel with satisfaction: "Not as bad as it could be."

"What? What is it?" the archaeologist asked anxiously.

"Grahwwonds. They're pirates." The Doctor grinned madly. "Scavengers. They travel around the universe and steal, pilfer, plunder, filch everything they can scrounge without too much danger to themselves. They prey on the wreckages of other civilizations."

"Grownds."

"...More or less."

"Ok. Ok. They're aliens, yes?"

"Oh, yes. Shouldn't have arrived in this galaxy for another five centuries, but like I said... pirates. Likely as not, they stole someone else's time travel technology and ended up here by mistake. Wouldn't have stopped them, of course. They're a very unflappable species."

"So they were thrown into a different place and time and they just... went on pirating?"

"Why wouldn't they?"

Daniel turned the odd coin over and over in his hand and tried again: "Grahw-wounds."

"Oh, much better pronunciation!" cheered the Doctor.

"Alien tomb robbers," dead-panned Daniel.

"That's the Grahwwonds for you!" nodded the Doctor enthusiastically.

"Right."

There was a long moment of meaningful silence. It didn't seem as if the Doctor was picking up on the meaning of it at all.

"'Not as bad as it could be', you said," prompted Daniel.

"That's right."

"That isn't the same as 'good'."

"Ah... Thing is, Grahwwonds tend to like... traps," replied the Doctor.

Another moment of silence.

"_Excuse_ me?"

"It's kind of like their signature," insisted the alien blithely. "A way of saying 'a Grahwwond pirate was here'. Like those graffiti of yours, that kind of thing." He looked mighty pleased with himself as he concluded: "Only... they prefer traps that get sprung by the next unfortunate to follow in their steps."

"They litter the places they plunder with traps to mark their passage?"

"Yes. It's a matter of pride to them," said the Doctor earnestly.

"Fascinating!"

"It is!" agreed the Doctor enthusiastically. "Also a little dangerous." He turned abruptly to the sarcophagus and started poking and prodding it here and there. "Now if only..."

"DOCTOR!"


	2. You're going to see all sorts of things

**_You're going to see all sorts of things:_**

Something had given under his probing hands and suddenly, a vivid blue light had flared around Daniel's feet; an instant later, the archaeologist was dangling upside down from the ceiling, held in place by nothing visible, flailing and panicking: "Doctor!" he shouted again, his glasses tumbling down along with the content of half his pockets.

"Hold on! Stay still!" the Doctor yelled back. One hand was raised towards Daniel's hanging form in a reassuring gesture, the other was fiddling with his not-torch-thingie. "Just keep calm!"

"Something's dangling me from the ceiling!" screamed Daniel. "How do you expect me to stay calm!"

Gravity was determinedly attempting to drag his shirt over his head and Daniel was fighting it ineffectually.

"It's just their version of a rolling snare!" the Doctor assured him. "It shouldn't harm you. Bit like bungee-jumping, only without the jumping. Just enjoy the view!"

"I'm afraid of heights!" yelled Daniel. His panicked flailing was making him swing and sway and it was making him sick.

"Alright, alright! I'm getting you down!" exclaimed the Doctor.

Unfortunately, right at that moment he stepped on another trigger and a slab of the floor gave out under him, plunging him into a pit. By sheer luck, he managed to grab the edge of the hole with a hand and halted his fall. Only sandy gravel skid and dropped into the trap.

Now the two of them were dangling symmetrically, one above the other.

"Oops," he commented cheerfully.

Daniel screamed again.

"Not to worry!" the Doctor called out and waved his not-torch a little. "I've still got this!" He promptly put it between his teeth to have his hands free.

He tried to heave himself out, but while he was fumbling about, seeking a handhold, he accidentally pulled a hidden lever instead.

A volley of green laser blast erupted from both sides of the room, colliding in the middle with a burst of deadly sparkles.

"Stop touching things!" yelled Daniel in a panic.

The Doctor got himself out at last, moving a little more cautiously, and took a moment to dust his leather jacket off. "Blimey, they were really thorough! Must have found a good loot!" Then he grabbed his metal stick firmly and pointed it at Daniel, who instinctively recoiled, giving himself even more momentum to sway.

He whimpered.

"Try and stay still!" grumbled the Doctor.

Daniel snarled at him.

The soft buzz of the little device filled the chamber, a strange tune accompanied by their harsh breaths.

"Aha!" exclaimed the Doctor after a moment, dropping his hands by his sides. "It's a trigger trap!"

"What?" yelped Daniel, who between the adrenaline rush and the blood going to his head was starting to feel confused.

"I can't take you down."

"WHAT?!"

"If I disable the force-field that's holding you up, it'll act as a trigger for a series of other traps that are presumably all around us. Very clever. Very clever indeed."

"I don't care how clever this is, just take me down!"

"In a moment. We have to disable the other traps before..." He moved slowly in a circle, metal device held out and buzzing, scanning their surroundings. "...oh. Oh!"

"What? What!"

"They're all connected... all of them... and the hub of all the triggers... is right above you!"

Daniel renewed his efforts to fumble with his clothes and tried to see the ceiling beyond his own feet, hands reaching towards his knees and grabbing futilely at his trousers.

"Doctor Jackson!" called the Doctor. "You have to reach above your feet and switch the triggers off!"

"I can't!" shouted Daniel, terrified.

"Of course you can!"

Moaning to himself, Daniel let himself fall back into the uncomfortable position and closed his eyes, drawing a few breaths. He was hoping to calm and centre himself. It didn't quite work.

"Come on, Daniel!" came the Doctor's voice, encouraging. "Just reach up and find the control panel. You don't have to worry about falling. The force-field will hold you, I promise."

Swallowing convulsively, Daniel metaphorically braced himself and then forced himself to try the kind of abdominal exercise he'd always hated back in high school. His muscles protested, but they did the job, to his immense relief, and he quickly found a couple of cracks to hold on to: it was all well and good to trust an invisible force-field, but what if he accidentally switched it off?

Gulping air down, he called back shakily: "What... what do I do now?"

The Doctor leaped cautiously to one of the bulky lamps and turned it around to point at Daniel's body, crouched upside down on the ceiling.

What had been a confusing collection of dancing shadows abruptly became a very detailed collection of harsh surfaces and sharp ridges under the blazing light.

"Look around yourself! Try and figure out what technology they've used. There has to be a control panel or something like that."

"How can I possibly know what an alien control panel looks like?!" shouted Daniel, feeling panic mount again.

"The grahwwonds are scavengers and thieves! They would have used the technology they found at the site they robbed!"

"Ancient Egyptians did not have technology!" yelled Daniel.

"Their gods did!"

"What?"

"Tust me, it'll look Egyptian to you. Come on, Doctor Jackson. You're an expert on this! Find the controls!"

Daniel closed his eyes again and squared his jaw, reaching for the inner strength that had supported him through rows of childhood bullies, countless nights of feverish study, instance after instance of derision-filled attempts at conferences and presentations.

"Right." He snapped open his eyes and dared to move one hand over the area of the ceiling he was attached to (the other was still holding onto the rock for dear life). "Hidden panel, hidden panel... gotcha!"

A somewhat smoother surface budged under his hand and he pushed and pulled until it got loose. Underneath it there was a jumble of cables, strings, buttons, metallic parts and pebbles stuck in strategic places. He wasn't an expert, but it looked like a shoddy job, jury-rigged in a hurry, and if he wasn't mistaken, they'd cannibalized at least one human lamp along with whatever technology had, indeed, been in the prison-tomb.

To his growing shock, Daniel realized that he was indeed able to decipher the signs on some of the buttons and parts: "It's hieratic!" he called out in shock. "The simpler writing system used for accounts and legal, medical and mathematical texts!"

He felt like laughing, incredulity and delight bubbling up inside him.

"Hold on. I know this!" he exclaimed to himself, recognising some of the writings: "It's a spell to make an _ushabti_ work for its owner in the underworld!"

Comprehension bloomed into his mind: "Of course! Of course! The _ushabtiu_ were intended to act as substitutes for the deceased, should he or she be called upon to do manual labor in the afterlife – they're what would activate the traps if this was magic!"

Forgetting to be afraid of heights in his enthusiasm, he turned to look at the Doctor, who was watching him with his arms crossed over his chest and a satisfied, trusting grin on his upturned face, and shouted excitedly: "This is making an extraordinary amount of sense!"

The Doctor gave him thumbs up and Daniel turned back to the slapdash control panel.

"Right... right. Here we go." His free hand ran quickly over the marked buttons, translating and discarding hastily as he went along, until he found it: "Yes, yes, 'folded cloth' for secrecy, then the servant... 'stick' for stopping... and 'hand' for command!"

He punched the sequence in quickly, feeling utterly certain that it was correct, and with a far too loud click, something reacted.

Daniel held his breath.

A long moment of utter silence, then another...

"Good job, Doctor Jackson!" The Doctor shouted with sincere joy. "Now it's my turn." In a moment, he was bouncing all over the room, blaring his buzzing little device at random spots.

Before he knew it, a rather giddy Daniel was lowered to the floor, more gently that he'd expected. Panting harshly with the aftereffects of both fear and elation, he patted himself down, once to check he was in one piece, then again to try and smooth his clothes down.

The Doctor slapped him enthusiastically on the shoulder and handed him his glasses, miraculously intact: "Really good job, there! Knew you had it in you."

He flared his not-torch at the last of the triggers and even the pit in the floor disappeared seamlessly. "There! That was the last of it disabled. We can go now."

"What is that thing, anyway?" asked Daniel, finally giving in to his curiosity.

"A sonic screwdriver."

The Doctor was grinning his daft, ear-to-ear smile.

"A _sonic_ screwdriver."

"Yup!"

"A sonic _screwdriver._"

"_Very_ useful," the Doctor nodded proudly.

Daniel Jackson, renown madman, widely considered delusional, stared at him, mouth agape: "I can't believe someone thought to invent a sonic screwdriver!"

The Doctor looked at him strangely: "You just used alien technology disguised as Egyptian magic to disarm a trap left behind by extraterrestrial pirates... and the thing you find it hard to believe is my sonic screwdriver?"

"...Right. Well. When you put it that way."

They got out in silence. The Doctor didn't seem inclined to talk unnecessarily, though he had a spring in his step that spoke of his satisfaction; and Daniel, well. He was dealing with delayed shock or something, to be sure, because he was feeling light-headed and faintly nauseous. Some part of him was also attempting to digest the frankly disturbing amount of impossibilities that he'd racked up since meeting this mad, fantastic alien that had come to Earth...

"Why have you come to Earth again?" he found himself saying out loud.

The Doctor gave him a blank gaze: "To check on Sutekh," he explained with exaggerated patience.

Daniel frowned, but the Doctor motioned for silence, jerking his head towards the guard they'd passed coming in. For some weird reason, Daniel was more disconcerted by the poor man's presence than he'd been by Ancient Egyptians writings on an electrical control panel.

Shouldn't the world have changed as much as he had in those short hours?

Instead, the man was still in his normal position and even nodded normally in greeting as they passed, cool as a cucumber. Daniel frowned at himself, vaguely aware that perhaps that wasn't as normal as all that after all. Then he shrugged it off: he was too tired to figure out what was real and what was not just then. And he was probably in shock anyway.

Once they were back into the borrowed Jeep and on their way back (having masterfully avoided all other vehicles, buildings and sturdy tents in the area, despite Daniel's very founded misgivings about the Doctor's ability as a driver), the archaeologist tried again: "But why were you checking the prison-tomb? How did you even know there was anything to check?"

"Intercepted a warning signal from my Tardis..." The Doctor trailed off the explanation that he'd begun at a rapid pace and seemed to mull things over for a bit.

Then, quite out of the blue, he asked: "Have you ever heard the name Marcus Scarman?"

"Of course! He was a great man, Fellow and Professor of Archaeology at All Souls College, Oxford University," said Daniel warmly. Scarman was a man he'd always admired, a pioneer of modern archaeology. "He disappeared in 1911, after finding the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Horus, which he was excavating at the time. There's a lot of nonsensical talk of a curse that supposedly killed him for profaning the tomb..."

"It wasn't a curse," his strange companion muttered darkly.

Daniel froze. "What do you mean? Are you-" he gasped and raised a hand as if to warn off the truth he was starting to glimpse: "Are you trying to tell me that he was killed by- by _something_ in that burial chamber?" His eyes widened: "Was it something alien?"

"Yeah... more or less." The Doctor turned to look at Daniel earnestly, ignoring the road: "What really happened was, he was blasted by an energy laser released by the statue of Sutekh."

The car swerved abruptly and Daniel grabbed the frame of his seat, paling with fright: "D-Doctor, shouldn't you watch..."

"And that happened because when he discovered the inner chamber, he also discovered Sutekh himself, thereby accidentally allowing him a chance of escape, by way of controlling Scarman's corpse to construct a rocket aimed at the Eye of Horus on Mars," went on the Doctor obliviously.

"...where you're going- wait. Wait. The Eye of Horus on _Mars_?!"

"Yup."

"The- the Eye of Horus? The symbol of protection, royal power and good health?"

The Doctor glanced distractedly at the road, adjusted their course by swerving madly towards the right direction and turned to Daniel, raising an eyebrow.

"It was carved on talismans to protect from curses. Sailors would paint the symbol on the bow of their vessel to ensure safe sea travel," Daniel blabbed on, simply incapable of letting go of the few certainties that he still retained.

"They also used to make funerary amulets in that shape," told him the Doctor, looking amused.

"What has that got to do with _Mars_?" almost wailed Daniel.

"As it happens, the particular Eye of Horus I'm talking about is – no, sorry, _was_ – an Osirian device that beamed a signal from a pyramid on Mars down to Sutekh's prison here on Earth, suppressing his powers so that he couldn't break out. Which... come to think of it, isn't that far from the traditional role of warding off evil. Huh. Point for mythology, I guess." The Doctor looked faintly impressed.

"There's a pyramid on Mars?!"

"Not anymore, there isn't."

"Why not?" asked Daniel weakly, past the point of disbelief and fast approaching outright mental rejection.

"Friend of mine and I, we managed to destroy the rocket, but then things got... complicated. Long story short, the Eye on Mars was destroyed, Sutekh was freed and then had to be trapped in a time tunnel with a length that was longer than an Osirian lifespan in order to prevent total annihilation of the universe."

Daniel took a deep breath and tried to ignore the way his stomach was lurching by focusing on another matter entirely: "Could he really have destroyed the entire universe? I mean, it's the universe! It's... huge and, and- full of... stuff and..."

"Sutekh's power was immense," said the Doctor gravely. "He could destroy entire stellar systems without breaking a sweat. Throw a man into agonising pain and leave him there for centuries with barely a thought. Telepathically turn other species into puppets to his will. Reanimate corpses and focus his power through them, enabling them to burn people to death with a touch."

Daniel paled more and more as he listened to the unusually grim Doctor's tale.

"And he was _obsessed_. He was paranoid, sure, but also extremely intelligent and patient. Nothing could have stopped him had he been released. Nothing _could_ stop him. He simply _cannot_ be allowed to escape the Time Tunnel. It would be the end of the world – of every world."

There was a grim silence for a minute.

"That's unbelievable," whispered Daniel, tasting bile on his tongue.

"Oh, you haven't heard the half of it." The Doctor grinned so suddenly that Daniel jumped in his seat, startled.

"Problem is, Sutekh still retained a cult of followers, and cults don't disappear just because the god they worship is defeated," said his alien companion blithely. "Now, on the whole, this wouldn't be a problem... or, not much of one. But! When a member of that cult finds a 51st century communication artefact accidentally drifting through what he thinks is the space-time continuum and _just_ so happens to have a master's degree in Electrotechnical Engineering that makes him able to reverse engineer it and twist it to the purpose of contacting his god, which isn't really a god but very much an imprisoned, scarily powerful alien... _Then_ it is a problem."

"Right," said Daniel weakly. Distantly, he noticed that the excessive speeding and careless driving weren't even bothering him anymore. Perspective and all that.

"You came here to prevent them from freeing him," he said slowly. Then frowned: "So... you're what, a jailer? A maintenance worker?"

The Doctor stared at him in outraged shock. "No!" he protested and went on muttering about ridiculous apes.

Daniel wasn't listening: "Is he going to escape, though? I mean, I get it that it was alien pirates instead of alien psychos this time, but is there going to be a next time? How do you escape from a Time Tunnel anyway?"

"Technically, you don't. It's impossible, end of the story."

Relieved but confused, Daniel blurted out: "Then why are you here?"

"Just checking out things for now. I told you, I got a signal on the Tardis while I was passing by, it worried me. I feared he was getting free. It seems the fanatical engineer was just delusional, instead."

He grinned that daft grin of his.

In a sudden bout of uncharacteristic snark, Daniel snarled: "That's a real pity. I was so looking forward to battling insane aliens bent on destroying the Earth."

"Oh, don't worry. You might have missed out on ol' Sutekh, but you'll get plenty of Goa'uld in exchange, isn't that great? Don't look at me like that. You'll handle them no problem. Well, some problems. But anyway. They'll make your life a lot more interesting!"

Daniel stared at him in horrified fascination: "You're mad. Completely bonkers."

The Doctor frowned at him in a way that looked almost like pouting.

Night had fallen over the valley temple when they stood once more in front of the odd police phone box where everything had started. It was freezing cold and Daniel had his hands under his armpits in a futile attempt at convincing himself his fingers weren't about to fall off. The Doctor, for his part, looked utterly unaffected.

The vaguely shell-shocked archaeologist stood shivering and just looked at the slightly battered, rectangular shape of that improbable space ship.

"Are you alright?" asked the Doctor unexpectedly.

Daniel almost jumped in mild fright. "Ah! Yes, yes," he lied, teeth chittering in the cold. "Fine."

The Doctor gave him a long, measured look.

Daniel shook his head a little frantically: "Absolutely fine, really. Just..." He sighed helplessly. "This is unbelievable."

"More or less unbelievable than the pyramids being parking spots?" the Doctor pointed out cheekily.

Daniel grimaced: "Very funny. It's just... a lot to take in," he said, feeling lost. "If I hadn't seen all those things for myself..."

"Yeah... about that." The Doctor leaned with nonchalance against the door of his Tardis, but Daniel got the impression of taut tension radiating from him nonetheless. "Want to see some more?"

Shuddering in the freezing darkness, Daniel stumbled a little: "Sorry, what did you just say?"

"I thought you might like to come along for a ride," said the Doctor, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "As a thank-you kind of thing," he added. "Since you sort of saved my life. More or less."

Hardly able to process what he was being offered, Daniel gaped at the time traveller: "You... you mean..."

"Yeah. Come on! Just the one trip, mind. See a little of 2500 B.C. and then get back."

"You're taking me to Ancient Egypt."

"Yup."

"Oh my God. Oh. My. God. You're taking me to Ancient Egypt!"

"If you want. I mean-"

"YES!"

"Alright, then. Come in." The Doctor's voice disappeared into the cavernous insides of a police box that was, most definitely, not a police box.

Daniel remained rooted just outside the doors, gaping like a fish.

But only for a moment: then his brain kicked in and he ran inside at full speed, only to slow down and gape once more at the wide, luxuriant interior, all shades of greens and blues and welcoming oranges and technological gadgetry and grates on the floor and huge coral-like trunks and, and, and...

"It's... bigger on the inside," he almost whimpered.

The Doctor gave a long-suffering sigh: "Yes. Yes, it is."

The Doctor started inputting commands and fiddling with the controls, running here and there all around the central console. The core flared up and down with energy and the trumpeting elephants sounds started up again.

Daniel just turned slowly on himself, mouth agape, taking in the patterned hexagons impressions on the golden walls and spying weird writings on a monitor and the sticky notes on it that made his heart beat wildly with the excitement of a scholar before a major discovery; until a violent jerk threw him onto the floor.

"Oops!" was the only reply to his indignant cry.

Another tremor shook the Tardis; Daniel dragged himself to the nearest railing while the Doctor banged on the console with a spanner, then they were thrust aside by a violent jolt. The Doctor, evidently used to the jerky shakes, managed to hold onto some handholds and kept busying himself with odd-looking levers and buttons; but Daniel was just knocked here and there, until he felt like a giant bruise.

"Right! Here we go!" shouted the Doctor far too cheerfully.

They materialized with a teeth-clattering thump and Daniel was no longer able to keep his comment for himself: "Seems you aren't any better at driving alien stuff than you are with human cars."

"I'm an excellent driver!" protested the Doctor, offended.

"Matter of opinion," muttered Daniel, glaring at him while he picked himself up and grumbling under his breath about the obvious need for intergalactic driving licences.

The Doctor glowered: "Did I, or did I not get you where you wanted to go?" he demanded testily. "I dare you to find someone else able to, especially on that backward little planet of yours!"

But Daniel wasn't listening anymore: his eyes widened with hope and he ran to the door, forgetting everything else in his hurry to wrench it open.

A pleasant, sunny picture of whites and greens and sandy browns was framed by the blue doors of the Tardis.

They were on the quay sides of some small town and the Nile flew peaceful and immutable by, just a few meters to their left, beautiful and serene. The quay, by contrast, was as lively and bustling as an active market place could be.

Daniel stepped out into the noise and confusion of that dream come true with a sense of awe he hadn't felt since he was a little child.

Small boats were rocking gently where they were docked, the theatre of incessant comings and goings. Barefooted men in short, white loinclothes and women with eyes lined with kohl and dresses with straps wrapped round the body mingled and mixed in the area, chatting, discussing, telling tales or asking questions, bartering and peddling.

Farmers' wives showed off cloth or fowl to bronze-skinned sailors ready to trade small sacks of grain. A woman a mere few feet from them was selling bread to a group of young men; beside her a sailor was exchanging fish for figs. Children ran every which way in groups, getting underfoot.

On the other side of the road, two older women were handing out beer in small jars, while a little further, a loud buyer was checking out some vegetables and complaining about their quality, garnering angry replies from the seller. Everywhere things were passing hands in exchange for other things; the place was full of cheerful or shrewd bartering, generous or hard bargains.

Daniel stumbled around, speechless, drinking it all in. He did not have enough eyes and kept turning around and around on himself, in an effort to make the most of his mere two. It was beyond fantastic.

Amused, the Doctor leaned against his Tardis, arms crossed over his chest, and watched his guest run up to a knot of chatting people on one end of the marketplace only to let himself be captivated by a shady dealer showing off tourmaline stones on the other.

A deep, if weak, humming voice, captured Daniel's attention and he stopped to stare at a thin old man sitting crosslegged on a straw mat, fiddling with a set of scales: "_Do not move the scales nor alter the weights, Nor diminish the fractions of the measure..."_

The Doctor joined him with laid back ease and Daniel found his voice and wits: "It's the '_Wisdom of Amenemope_'!" he whispered loudly, gesticulating to the old man. He was bursting with so much excitement that he was trembling. "He's singing the teachings of Amenemope! That's amazing, it was dated at least 1500 years later than this! It's... Hold on, it's impossible." He turned to the Doctor, looking rather wild: "He's singing in English. How can he possibly be singing in English?!"

"He's not. You're just hearing it."

"What?"

"It's the Tardis, it... well, it's a bit complicated but basically... oh, just go with the flow, why don't you?"

"Yeah... yeah, I will..." Dazed, Daniel kept staring happily around, an incredulous, delighted smile upon his face.

"I'm in Egypt," he whispered reverently.

"Yup! The bubastite district of Am-Khent, to be precise. And it's..." the Doctor made a show to check his wristwatch: "...the end of Ahket, the flooding season."

Daniel let out a whoop of pure joy.

Something was happening. The people – merchant and buyers, farmers and sailors; women and men alike – were all moving towards the riverbank, joyously calling out to each other and to the boats that were floating leisurely down the Nile.

The Doctor and Daniel moved with the crowd and found a good spot from where to watch the papyrus boats, filled with men and women whose white clothes seemed to shine in the sun. Most men were playing a compelling tune on lotus pipes and it drifted to the awaiting crowd along with the festive rhythms of the cymbals rattled by the women. The cheering spectators, Daniel among them, enthusiastically accompanied the music with hand clapping.

"It's the procession in honour of Bast," told him the Doctor.

Daniel's smile widened as he hastily recalled what he knew of the lioness-headed goddess of Lower Egypt.

"Further north, where her biggest temple lies, they'll be carrying her statue out on the Nile before returning it to the temple until next year," went on the Doctor. "Here in the smaller settlements, it's just about letting those who couldn't afford to travel up there this year see a bit of the Feast."

The boats docked gracefully and the musicians disembarked, swiftly arranging themselves in a joyous line. The two time travellers watched them pass and then mingled with the commoners following the procession in chaotic companionship, happy and rowdy.

Daniel was overjoyed to find out that his odd appearance – glasses and cargo pants and all – didn't faze the locals at all.

They all welcomed him and the endless questions he couldn't hold back with a careless: "You're a foreigner, aren't you? From the North, with those colours." And then they proceeded to instruct him on anything and everything from how to walk to what to eat. They were treating him a bit as if he was a child, but not unkindly and the archaeologist was fascinated by this confirmation that the sense of identity of the ancient Egyptians was based on culture rather than ethnicity or race.

A matronly woman even told him encouragingly: "You already speak properly. That's a better start than most savages!" And a sanctimonious man with greyer skin then the rest (perhaps he was ill?) claimed patronizingly: "It is the duty of the blessed who live in the land of _maat, _the divine order_,_ to educate the uncivilised. Listen to us, do as we say, and you'll be one of the People soon."

Too awed to feel insulted, Daniel gratefully soaked up everything they were telling him, frantically comparing what he was seeing and experiencing with what he'd gleaned from his studies.

It was fascinating on such an intense level that he could never have imagined it and he let himself be swept up in their celebrations with growing exuberance.

The procession walked a rough circle around the town, then returned to the river and left, picking up the unusual music once more; the locals cheered them away and then turned to a less dignified but much more spontaneous celebration, with shouting and dances and what were possibly games and a lot of elaborate food and beverages.

Daniel was surprised to be handed a bowl of sweet-scented wine: he was told laughingly that beer was for the days of work, but only wine could honour the great Bast. It was very strange wine, too, denser and more concentrated than he was used to, with a spicy but cool aftertaste. He drank it down and was promptly poured some more.

At one point, he realized that he could no longer see the Doctor, but he found it difficult to get worked up about it just then. He reasoned that it was only natural to get lost in such a crowd and since he was sure he remembered where the Tardis was, there was no need to feel any upset.

Swept up in the general enthusiasm, he forgot everything that wasn't the joyous celebration around him and hardly noticed that his welcoming hosts kept pouring him – and themselves – more and more wine. After all, it was only natural. Plenty of Egyptian sources recommended to appease leonine goddesses with the 'feasts of drunkenness'.

"Drink, foreigner!" they laughed uproariously. "Drink to the Divine Mother who crushes the Snake and protects the People! Drink and you won't want to leave the beautiful land of _maat_ ever again!"

"I already don't," Daniel informed them, slurring.

Everybody laughed even louder, and cheered, and poured him more wine.

That was how the Doctor found him, lying in a heap of other men, all lazily stretched like plump cats.

"There you are!" he exclaimed, relieved. "Sorry about abandoning you."

"'Snot pr'blm," mumbled Daniel, feeling fuzzy in a sweetly happy way.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow, amused: "It is said that more wine is drunk in these days of feasting than in all the rest of the year!" he declared, grinning from ear-to-ear. "Seems you've done your part to help with that!"

Daniel gave him a loopy grin and uttered a sleepy: "Whe' were y'?"

"Just..." the Doctor gestured vaguely. "Shouldn't have wandered off, I guess, but I spotted a minor problem downtown and got a bit distracted. You wouldn't believe the amount of troubles an abandoned Goa'uld artefact could do in the hands of a well-meaning medic! Had to disable it. Did you have fun in the meanwhile?"

Daniel nodded amiably, not entirely interested – except that one of the words he'd just heard didn't make any sense. He didn't much like when words didn't make sense. This problem was interfering with the nice buzz all around his head and he didn't much like that, either. So he asked: "Wha' on E'rth 's a Gow...tha'?"

"There aren't any on Earth," replied the Doctor unconcernedly. "At least, not that I know of."

Daniel giggled, because that wasn't an answer at all, and that made it funny.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows again and chuckled: "Come on, let's get you out of here."

He leaned down to pick Daniel up, but the archaeologist didn't like to be jostled. His stomach didn't like it either: "Don' wanna," he whined. "Wanna know." He nodded decisively to strengthen his declaration.

"Oh, don't worry. If historians don't lie, you're going to be quite the expert about them in a few years," the Doctor told him cheerfully, and raised him over his shoulder effortlessly.

Daniel whined again, this time wordlessly.

"But if you truly insist," told him the Doctor while moving swiftly towards the Tardis, "then I'll tell you that the Goa'ulds were the false gods that ruled this country by fear and oppression, all the while suppressing the technological progress in its population."

"Gods 're real!" protested Daniel, feeling dizzy and not in a good way. He frowned, somehow aware that it had sounded a lot better in his head. It wasn't all that important, though, and sleep sounded better than arguing anyway.

"Nope," retorted the Doctor, lingering on the final popping sound. "See, that's what they do: they use advanced alien technology to present themselves as omnipotent and thus they rule. Until there is a rebellion, of course. That's one thing you can always count on humans for. You're exceptionally prone to give other races a chance to take control and dominate you, one could almost think you like it, really – easy life and all that; except that as soon as you're oppressed – or given a few generations of it – you stand up and shout 'No' in the bravest, bloodiest ways ever. It's disconcerting."

"Hmm," managed Daniel, whose mind had stopped registering the meaning of words a while ago.

The Doctor propped him up against the doors of the Tardis and scrutinized him, growing worried: "Doctor Jackson? Daniel? I hope this is just you not holding your alcohol well, Daniel, because you really look like shit."

The sonic screwdriver whirred, scanning the archaeologist's pupils.

"Can you even hear me? Did you eat something you didn't recognize? Or drink? What was it? Daniel, look at me!"

Daniel's head lolled: "Tir'd," he mumbled. "Don' wanna."

"Damn it!" grumbled the Doctor. "You're stoned. Why is it that I can never take you stupid apes anywhere without you finding troubles?"

Thanks to the Tardis' medbay, it became easily evident that the wine had been spiked with blue lotus. The Doctor sighed in relief: it was nothing dangerous, it just caused a state of relaxed inhibitions, generally making the users more talkative, comfortable, and aroused. Of course, it had been administered with wine, and alcohol enhanced the effects of the active chemicals. So Daniel was looking forward to a lengthy period of induced lassitude and blissful sleep.

The Doctor gave a put-upon sigh and set about taking him back.

When he dropped the sleeping form of the archaeologist gently on the cheap hotel bed, he murmured: "It was good to meet you, Doctor Jackson. I don't know how much of this you'll remember, considering the amount of blue lotus you ingested, but... _I_ won't forget you." He thoughtfully considered the passed out form: "Maybe I'll drop in on you sometime or other. After all, you're going to have a fantastic life! And you certainly liked the time travelling bit..."

Then a sudden idea lit up his eyes: "Oh, _that's_ what I forgot to tell her!"

And with a manic grin, he was off once more, aiming for 21st century London, and an intriguing blonde girl.


	3. Ghosts from the past

**_Ghosts from the past,_**

It was a normal day when it happened. Honest. Well, as normal as John's life could get since he'd met Sherlock, which... wasn't very normal at all, yeah; but on the upside, it was interesting, which was much more important to John.

Anyway, it was a quiet day. They'd been to a crime scene, but it turned out to be a boring one because Sherlock noticed the fake teeth from a vampire costume, even if no-one else had, and the smear of invisible ink for readmission stamping to a nearby club where a masquerade had taken place the night before, and he'd worked the whole thing out in fifteen seconds flat, down to the attempt at misdirection via a copy of someone else's costume the killer had tried to fool them with.

Lestrade had been reluctantly impressed, Anderson had been not-so-reluctantly flustered, John had been amazed and heaped enough compliments on Sherlock that the detective had graciously agreed to eat; so they were on their way to Angelo's for a companionable lunch.

In John's book, things couldn't get much better.

Which is why he groaned when Sherlock stopped abruptly at the mouth of a narrow alley and said urgently: "John!"

A moment later he was hurrying down the alley and John, of course, was right behind him, even if he had no clue of what had captured the genius' attention this time.

"John, look at this!"

'This' was an old telephone box, the usual size and shape, only painted blue instead of red. John grinned to himself, thinking that it looked just like the Tardis. It was even tucked away into a convenient corner!

Of course, most telephone boxes, regular or otherwise, were pushed out of the way these days. Not much use for them anymore, what with all the mobile phones.

Nevertheless, John felt his grin widen as he told Sherlock: "It's a police public call box."

Sherlock stared at him. Then he frowned: "It isn't."

John blinked: "What? Of course it is. Isn't it?"

He quickly checked the instructional label on the little compartment that held the phone. It said _Police Telephone - Free for Use of Public - Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately - Officers and Cars Respond to Urgent Calls - Pull to Open_.

"See?" he told Sherlock. "Just an old phone box." He pulled the somewhat battered hinged door and tried the phone. "Disconnected, though," he said off-handedly. "Not that that's strange."

"Oh, really?" asked Sherlock, dark and sarcastic.

John looked at him in surprise: "Well, it's not like they're used anymore, are they? Nowadays if you want to get help from the police, you use a mobile phone!" He shrugged: "Didn't think there were any left around, to be honest."

"That's the point, John. There aren't any," retorted Sherlock grimly. "This kind of fixed kiosks might have been common during the sixties, but nowadays they have all been withdrawn from service. Police officers today carry mobile phones, or at least two-way radios!"

"Ok," said John slowly. He shrugged. "Maybe this is just a leftover. It's disabled and everything, Sherlock, it could have just been left behind for whatever reason..."

"Except that it wasn't, because it wasn't here two days ago," retorted Sherlock. "Nor at any time I came this way before that."

John watched his best friend steadily: "Look, I know you have memorized every street in London, and far be it from me to doubt your memory, but couldn't you have just... forgotten this?"

Sherlock shot him an incensed look.

"Maybe you deleted it!" protested John. "You delete all sorts of things."

"I don't delete _useful_ things, John," replied Sherlock with great dignity. Then, at his blogger's unimpressed look, he huffed: "Police boxes typically had enough space that they could provide shelter, or, as was often the case, to temporarily house an arrested individual inside and keep him under lock until transport to a station could be arranged," he rattled off pedantically. "That might potentially be useful. I wouldn't have deleted something like that!"

"Ok. Well. I can't think of any other explanation, Sherlock. Because it's pretty clear that this has been here for ages."

"No, it hasn't."

"What, just because you don't remember..."

"John, don't you ever _observe_?" hissed Sherlock. "Look at the surface! There are no cracks in the finish and no dark streaks from moisture damage. We're in London! If it had been here for any length of time, it would have been exposed to rain, fog... humidity of all sorts!"

He ran a hand over the wood, not stopping his running commentary: "Few stains; raised wood grain, dry rough feeling, this hasn't been in the weather long... It's a little battered, but doesn't look like it needs any immediate restoration work; but it isn't anything like new either. Conclusion, it's been in and out of the open air countless times. Except that if that was the case, the finish should be needing to be reapplied, or appear to have been reapplied recently; instead it doesn't look like it's even beginning to fail and there's no evidence that it isn't the original coat."

He turned to John, who was watching him with his usual, admiring half-smile, and scowled: "It's completely inconsistent with the traces of weather and degradation on the wall behind it. Not to mention that there are no graffiti on it! There are dubiously artistic expressions scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on almost every surface of this alley low enough to be reached, _except_ for this box. What's protecting it from defacement? And look at the hinges!" he pointed dramatically, warming to the subject. "The wear pattern shows that these doors are almost always opened inwards, but a real police box door would open outwards..."

"So this isn't a real police phone box?"

"Obviously not!"

"Oh, I get it," said John, smile suddenly widening.

"What? What do you get?"

"Someone's doing a practical joke, Sherlock, that's all – I doubt it's a crime."

The consulting detective looked at him in slight confusion: "What kind of practical joke?"

John looked back with pitying incredulity: "I need to get you in front of a TV more often."

"Pointless waste of time," mumbled Sherlock gloomily. He was never happy with John's on and off crusade to educate him in contemporary pop culture.

John gave a drawn out, mock-put upon sigh: "This, Sherlock, is very likely the most recognisable image connected with the longest running and arguably most successful British sci-fi TV series!"

Sherlock gave him a mightily unimpressed look.

"No, seriously. The Tardis, the space ship in the program..."

Sherlock snorted derisively.

John narrowed his eyes severely and took on a lecture-tone: "...has a chameleon circuit that got stuck in this form at one point or another."

"A chameleon circuit," repeated Sherlock in a dry tone. "Ridiculous."

John ran a hand through his hair, exasperated. "It's just a TV show, Sherlock, but the point is – it's famous. Like, really, really famous. Plenty of Tardis-shaped gadgets around: play tents for children, wardrobes, DVD cabinets, toy boxes, cookie jars, book ends, key chains, bubble bath bottles..."

"Wait a minute. You have a USB hub in that shape. It's hidden among your medals in that box under your bed. It has all those pictures of that brunette in leather..."

"Yes, right, that's enough, thank you," said John hurriedly, and gave him an annoyed look: "You know, anyone else would be getting _really_ upset that you invaded my privacy. _Again._"

Sherlock scowled: "Don't go yelling at me for something so stupid, now, John. Focus. This," he pointed at the blue box, "is not a gadget."

"Fan-built full-size models are pretty common," replied John. "I think there's even a contest at that one cosplay event in Cardiff..."

"Models like that don't use this kind of quality materials, not even if they're to be used as props in a play or an amateur video filming. This is a solid street corner police box, John, wrongly built and out of place, to be sure, but real." Sherlock examined it with the concentration he usually reserved for the Petri dishes under his microscope. "It's out of place and I will find out _why._"

"Well, maybe it's the real deal. The actual Tardis," joked John.

"Oi! How do you know that?" came a completely unexpected voice from behind them.

A tall man with a leather jacket and rather conspicuous ears stood glowering at them, though not at all in a threatening way. His eyebrows shadowed clear, cerulean eyes that were far too old for any human face. For some reason, looking into those eyes John was reminded bluntly of his first deployment, on the coast of a war-ravaged Sierra Leone, and of the stormy sea there.

By his side, Sherlock scanned the newly arrived with analytical coldness.

"You're a traveller," he declared without a big preamble. "A soldier, too – no: former military. You were in a war, but no longer feel part of something, body language says you're a loner."

The man froze, every muscle taut with tension. John mentally sighed, preparing to do some damage control.

Sherlock went on without a care for how his string of deductions was being received: "You've got excellent self control and are used to blend in easily. You're economical in movement as well. Jumper under a leather jacket? Very modern minimalist. Monochromatic black, not a single extravagant detail. You don't want to make an impression. You cherish your loneliness. Yet your jacket gets often grabbed around the elbow... by someone who wears bright pink nail paint, looks like."

A muscle on the man's face contracted and John felt his hackles rise at the sudden impression of looming danger.

Sherlock's frown deepened as he continued: "Northern accent, but you're familiar with London. Comfortable in its rhythm. Judging by the state of your boots, you were in Peckham recently..."

The man made a visible effort to relax and, somewhat to John's surprise, produced a very affable, if a bit disturbing, smile: "The Powell Estate, yeah," he confirmed.

Sherlock was on a roll, and instantly wove the tidbit of information in his speech: "Traditionally a working class community; certainly not a touristy area. No hotels there. Plenty of immigrant communities, especially from Asian countries, but you sound British and don't show any somatic or cultural Asian trait, doubtful you'd have family there. So, staying at a friend's. Confirmed by the traces of banana mush on your sleeve, that indicate..."

"I like bananas!" loudly interrupted the stranger, who had apparently had enough of Sherlock's... sherlockness. "Good sources of potassium. You should eat them more, it'd do you a world of good."

Derailed, Sherlock stared at him for an unexpectedly long moment.

"Now, if you're finished metaphorically dissecting me? I need to run this," he waved a curved rectangle of slightly rusty metal in the air, "through some scans and also to find out who, exactly, _you_ are," he finished pointing at John.

Sherlock bristled: "What do you want with John?" at the same time as John exclaimed, surprised: "Me? I'm... no-one. Just his friend," he jerked a thumb at Sherlock. "Sorry about the deductions, by the way, he's got no tact, I'm afraid..."

Sherlock's protest to that declaration went ignored as the leather-clad man's eyes bore into John's: "But how do you know about my Tardis? Have we met before? No, I would remember if we had. Are we going to meet, then? Hold on, no, it would still be the past for you. Right question probably is: have _you_ met me before? That would indicate I shall meet you in my future..."

"Oh, God." John's jaw fell in utter shock. "You're having me on."

"Excuse me..." tried Sherlock, who never dealt well with not being the centre of attention.

Something beeped on the hunk of metal the man was holding and he tore his attention from John, fixing it on the thing instead: "No matter, time's awasting here."

He pushed past them without a second glance and whipped out a key for the police phone box.

"This is impossible!" cried John in utter shock. But the door was already swinging open – inwards, just like Sherlock had noticed – granting him a glimpse of a golden-hued, impossibly large room with a central column that flared bright blue in greeting.

"You're the Doctor!" he shouted, his jaw falling into an expression that was equal parts incredulity and stunned elation.

The man halted on the threshold, casting a bemused look back at him: "Yeah."

"You're real!"

An eyebrow raised in amusement: "Yup. Very real, me." He disappeared into the Tardis, but left the door open invitingly.

"Oh, for the love of...!" grumbled Sherlock. "John, you're being completely irrational. And you!" he shouted after the stranger, but John cut him off before he could say anything unfortunate.

"He's real!"

"I can see that," muttered Sherlock through gritted teeth. "He's right in front of us, after all. Really, could you be any more obvious, John?"

"No, you don't understand... This is_ THE Doctor_ we're talking about!"

"Doctor who?" asked Sherlock in indifferent confusion.

"Yeah, him!" exclaimed John with glee.

Sherlock stared at him, nonplussed.

"Oi!" the Doctor interjected, reappearing on the threshold. "Are you coming in or what?"

Without a second thought, John bounded into the Tardis with a huge grin. An enthusiastic whoop wafted out at once.

Cursing under his breath, Sherlock stalked after him.

And promptly stopped because his mind refused to accept what his senses were perceiving. It felt worse than getting hit upon the head: his hard drive was metaphorically short-circuiting in the futile attempt to process the impossibility he was presented with.

Forcing himself to draw a deep breath, Sherlock closed his eyes firmly to shut out the faulty perceptions and took a step back, out of the blue box.

He reopened his eyes, taking in it as a whole, mind whirring with simple calculations about volumes in three-dimensional space and not-so-simple calculations about _n_-dimensional Euclidean spaces and Stirling's approximation of the high dimensional behaviour of prismatic volumes.

He stepped back in, almost physically recoiling at the room that was much bigger than the space that appeared to contain it. It had a harmonious, organic look to it that, along with the dim, orange-greenish light, brought up unpleasantly a memory of his experimenting with psychedelic drugs that had resisted all his attempts at deletion.

The Doctor was right in the middle of it, his dark frame cast in a glow by the pulsing and twitching column of energy that was obviously the core of the place, alternately studying a monitor and fiddling with cables and strange humming tools over the metal shape he'd been carrying.

John was bouncing in place, an enormous grin on his face: "May I say it?" he asked Sherlock, looking like an excited puppy.

"Say what?" asked the Doctor, raising his head for a moment, perplexed.

John turned to him quickly: "He always gets snippy when I state the obvious," he explained with a careless jerk of his thumb towards Sherlock, "but I _really_ want to say it."

"Well, go on and say 'it' then," said the Doctor with curious fascination.

"Say what?" grumbled Sherlock, still stuck on the threshold, fighting with his own understanding of reality and the conflicting perception of it he was faced with.

John threw his arms wide and cried triumphantly: "It's bigger on the inside!"

The Doctor started, then threw his head back and laughed himself silly.

Sherlock glared darkly at him and stalked inside: "That's impossible, John! All this, is impossible!" he said, much more quietly than was his wont.

Sobering up, John shot him a warm, concerned look: "Are you alright?" His joy was being somewhat dampened by Sherlock's obvious discomfort.

"This isn't possible," repeated his friend, grasping his scarf tightly and pulling it in a far too glaring show of unease.

John was back by his side in a moment and started talking quietly: "Look, I would recommend you a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, which is working quite well for me I assure you..."

"What?" was Sherlock's half-strangled reaction.

John smiled gently: "I've just been plunged in the middle of my favourite TV show. The probability of being woken up by your violin or one of your explosions soon and find out this is all a dream is... pretty damn high. So I'm just going to enjoy it while it lasts," he said cheerfully.

Sherlock's lost look made him bite his lip in worry and try a different approach: "It's just a cloaking device – technology disguising what's there. An illusion. Chameleon circuit, remember?"

Sherlock could accept that – possibly – if they were in an open expanse. A field, or at least a place. He may not like illusions – in fact, he _despised_ them – but he could think of several different ways to achieve that effect, ranging from chemically-induced hallucinations and stealth tricks such as dark paint or artificial cooling to minimize electromagnetic emissions, all the way to optical metamaterials to bend light around an object.

None of them allowed for the fact that the police box from the outside occupied only a fraction of the space required for its inside.

The alley couldn't be part of the illusion, Sherlock had been there before and nothing had changed in the surrounding environment. The box was ensconced between very real walls.

It. Was. Impossible.

John sighed: "I don't suppose you could just accept this... go with the flow, as it were?"

"Reality is more rationally intelligible than that, John, " he said in a low, precise voice.

Silence, broken only by the Doctor's buzzing and whirling instruments far in the background and a sort of low humming all around them.

John ran a hand through his hair: "Ok, ok. I know you see the world differently. But please, let me ask you something. You taught me that it is a capital mistake to theorize without enough data."

Sherlock narrowed his eyes and nodded jerkily.

John nodded back: "So. Will you accept that what you know _so far_ isn't enough to formulate a proper theory? And just keep gathering data for now?"

Refusing to admit the wave of relief that was surging into him at John's suggestion, Sherlock muttered something unintelligible.

John squeezed his arm briefly: "You're the one who taught me: when you've eliminated the impossible..." John was smiling gently. He didn't need to complete the quote, but stressed in a whisper: "_However improbable_."

A longer silence.

The Doctor was studying some readings on his monitor intently.

John sighed and turned to admire the TARDIS. "You are so lovely," he told the ship fondly, running a gentle hand over the nearest coral strut. He wasn't remotely fazed by the fact that he was talking to a spaceship – after all, it was a _sentient_ one – and grinned in delight when she chirped a musical chime in response.

The Doctor stopped what he was doing and shot him a vaguely amazed glance.

Somehow, that was what jolted Sherlock out of his tense mood at last: "Yes, John tends to have that effect," he told the Doctor amusedly.

"What?" his friend asked, bewildered.

But Sherlock had moved on, his thoughts spiralling down a half-dozen paths already and now that he had worked out a way to cope with the shift in the boundaries he had believed applied to reality, he was processing the situation with his customary speed, his mind busy with spanning lines of questioning, rapidly archiving new and correcting stored information and designing a few side-line experiments at the same time, so he ignored John and just marched up to the hexagonal control console.

"So... Doctor. Who are you exactly?" he questioned.

With relief, John saw that his eyes were no longer cloudy with uncertainty and were instead taking on the diamond-sharp intensity of Sherlock's problem-tackling attitude.

In light of this, the former army doctor decided to take his own advice and just go with the flow: with a last fond pat to the Tardis, he joined Sherlock and the Doctor near the console and watched them spar.

"Well?" demanded Sherlock, impatient as usual.

"Just a traveller," was the non-committal reply.

"No one who's 'just a traveller' has access to advanced cloaking technology," pointed out Sherlock.

"They do if they get around a lot," quipped the Doctor.

"Who do you work for?" insisted Sherlock.

"No-one. Always a freelancer, me. 'Fraid I've got a bit of a problem with authority. You know how it is."

John's mouth quirked in a wry half-smile at that, but Sherlock's seriousness didn't waver: "No government would let you run around on your own."

"Oh, governments!" the Doctor muttered with a sour look. "Such a bother, each and every one of 'em."

"If you were the one who came up with all this you would be in a lab somewhere coming up with more. Or possibly being dissected. If you're just using it, then you've got handlers keeping you under control. No genius is ever left alone," he said bitterly.

John sucked his breath in, the implications of that statement hitting him hard.

The Doctor gave them a very superior look: "Just a matter of knowing how to keep 'em in line."

"Just _who_ are you?" demanded Sherlock, exasperation colouring his words. "You have testing tools too sophisticated and obviously costly to be just cobbled together, your internet connection is as good as mine – which is saying quite a lot – even if you've basically declared yourself a field agent, and a freelancer at that, and you rely on databases not many have access to," he said, gesturing to the monitor that, as John suddenly noticed, was displaying several internet windows at once, some of which, it was true, didn't exactly look like your run-of-the-mill search engine.

"Hypernet," corrected the Doctor absently and gave Sherlock a measuring look: "Observant one, aren't you?"

Sherlock straightened with obvious pride but his eyes remained narrowed.

"Ok, then. Here, look. My identifications." The Doctor got a folded piece of leather out and handed it to Sherlock. "Doctor John Smith, scientific advisor of U.N.I.T. - United Nations Intelligence Taskforce."

"Yeah, right," was the acidic response.

"It says so right there," protested the Doctor. "Don't you believe me?"

Sherlock glowered and handed it back disdainfully: "It's blank."

"What?" Startled, the Doctor turned it around automatically, as if to check it.

John grinned from ear-to-ear: "He's a genius," he informed the Doctor smugly. "Won't work on him!" There was no mistaking the pride in his words.

"Damn," muttered the Doctor.

"What won't work?!" hissed Sherlock.

"That's psychic paper," explained John excitedly. "It's supposed to show you whatever he wants you to see."

Just because, he grabbed it, startling the Doctor, and glanced it over excitedly: "Yeah, it's... wow. It really says all that. Dr. John Smith... bla bla bla... scientific consultant... it's even got the official logo on it!"

He pointed out to Sherlock the black and white image of Earth between two spread wings, and underneath it, the initials U.N.I.T., which to him were as clear as day and very official-looking; but Sherlock just gritted his teeth: "It's. _Blank._"

"I know! Isn't it brilliant? 'Cos I'm seeing it, you see; but then, I'm just an average idiot. Guess this proves it, you're right. You are a genius!"

"Of course I am," agreed Sherlock thoughtfully, while the Doctor murmured: "Fascinating!"

"The question remain... who is _he_?" Sherlock asked of John, ignoring the way the strange man was scrutinizing both of them.

"He's the Doctor!" insisted John, just a little helplessly.

"You've said it more than enough times, John. There's plenty of doctors around..."

"Not like him there aren't."

"Quite right. I'm very unique," the man in question interjected. "Won't find anything else like me."

Sherlock glared at him.

"He really is," John agreed wholeheartedly. Then, after a second, he turned to the Doctor and pointing a thumb at Sherlock added loyally: "So's him, though."

"I'm beginning to think he is," mused the Doctor. Then he shook himself: "So! You've obviously travelled with me – John, was it? And I obviously looked different then. It must have been another life. You're not too surprised though. That's interesting. I assume you know about regeneration?"

"Yeah... that is no, I mean. Oh, God, I can't believe you're real. You're probably not." John shook his head to clear it. "Anyway. I haven't travelled with you. I know you because..." he trailed off, suddenly uncertain. "Er. Well. There's a TV show about your adventures. Kind of."

"Kind of?" echoes Sherlock, sounding peeved. "Honestly, John!"

"Oi! Did you just say _TV show?_"

John's smiled hesitantly: "Hum... yeah. Yeah, you see... it's a BBC series called..." He cleared his throat. "..._Doctor Who."_

"You mean he's an actor?" asked Sherlock with incredulous disgust.

"Nope," denied the Doctor at once. "Not much for acting, me. Granted there was that time Goldoni needed a fill-in at the last minute when a deranged Xenonian metamorph murdered their Pantalone, but that doesn't really count. Mmm. Did a bit of vaudeville in 23rd century Broadway, too – not the one in Manhattan, the one on Alpha Centauri III, I mean..."

"That qualifies you as an actor," pointed out Sherlock.

"I'm not an actor! I just travel a lot. You stay around for long enough, you end up doing a bit of everything!"

Sherlock raised an eyebrow mockingly.

"He's not an actor," explained John patiently. "He's the _protagonist._ The programme narrates his adventures as he explores the universe in space and time."

"What the hell? I'm a TV show?! That's... that's...!" The Doctor gaped.

"Interesting," murmured Sherlock, hands joining in the prayer position before his lips.

"No. Way." The Doctor spit out, radiating hostility. "I don't believe you."

"Ah... may I?" asked John gesturing to the monitor.

With a distrustful look, the Doctor motioned him to go ahead.

In no time at all, John had called up thousands of results for 'Doctor Who Streaming' on the search engine and given such evidence, it didn't take long for the Doctor's distrust to turn into indignant incredulity.

"Who the hell was responsible for this insanity?" he demanded, outraged.

"Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert," was John's prompt answer. "They were the ones who developed the original program back in the day. It aired from 1963 until 1989. Then there were only novels and audio plays from fans until 2005, when Russel T. Davies started writing again for a new BBC-produced series. Now it's mostly Steven Moffat who keeps it going..."

Both Sherlock and the Doctor stared at him in surprise.

"What!" said John defensively. "It's typical questions on trivia nights at the pub. Joe – the barman – is a great fan. So's Lestrade," he added under his breath. Sherlock harrumphed and whipped out his smartphone, obviously intent on getting himself up to speed on this suddenly important 'useless knowledge'.

"I'm a TV show!" moaned the Doctor. "Oh, the troubles this could cause! How did it even happen?" He glared at the pictures he was calling up on the screen: "And look at the actors they chose!" The only thing that poor sod had in common with him was the ears... And, really! His fourth incarnation wouldn't have been caught dead in such a scarf – except for that one time he lost a bet to Sarah Jane and she took a picture... "Like the music, though," he muttered as an aside.

"I like the actors fine," commented John, but as usual, he was ignored.

"How could I let it happen!?"

"You could be delusional," said Sherlock out of the blue.

The Doctor glared at him with such ferocity that even Sherlock looked spooked, which was unheard of. He recovered quickly, however: "It is a possibility. You believe yourself the protagonist of a show you know very well. Psychologically plausible."

The Doctor smiled nastily: "Except that I'm the real deal-"

"You're keeping your story straight with excellent skill, I can give you that..."

"Oi!" yelled the Doctor. "Watch what you're implying there!"

With the precise, low baritone that was so characteristically _him_, Sherlock summed up: "You're claiming to be an eccentric time-travelling humanoid alien of unspecified species, who explores the universe in a sentient time-travelling space ship and battles injustice wherever he finds it."

"Are you quoting from Wikipedia?" asked John incredulously. "And – he's a Time Lord, just so you know."

Sherlock shot him a quick glare.

"Yup. Last of the Time Lords, me," agreed the Doctor, voice gone dark and low.

"Time travel? Sentient ships?" burst out Sherlock, upset. "This is so completely illogical that words to define it fail me!"

The Tardis sparked indignantly at him from the console and he hastily stepped away, glaring incredulously and almost colliding with John.

"And I'm not _humanoid_," grumbled the Doctor, obviously disgruntled. "If anything, _you're_ gallyfreianoid!"

"Oh, never mind all that!" John finally exploded. He turned to the Doctor: "What I truly want to know is: do you really have a sonic screwdriver?"

Sherlock's incredulous glare swung to him.

The Doctor gave him a flat look, then relented: "Yup. Here, look," he flashed it out of a pocket and threw it and caught it deftly before handing it over with an unnerving smile.

John's eyes went wide with delight as he grasped it and examined it closely: "I want one!" he exclaimed enviously.

"Got a lot of cabinets to put up?" asked the Doctor, amused.

"You don't know the half of it," replied John, heartfelt. He thought it over briefly: "Thing is, Sherlock's experiments tend to have explosive aftermaths..."

"John!" his friend exclaimed indignantly.

"...and guess who's the one who ends up doing all the cleaning up and fixing stuff part? And there's also all the times we get kidnapped or arrested or tied up somewhere or... yeah, well, let's just say I could really use some sonicking in my life."

The Doctor flashed him a very amused grin but a moment later he was utterly serious, eyes gone dark with vexation: "What I cannot understand is how this TV show even came into being. It's... impossibly accurate. Even if they get half the things wrong," he added quickly.

Sherlock regarded him steadily: "Isn't it obvious?"

"Excuse me?"

"You typically pick up various human at different points in history in order to have some company during your travels, correct? Then after a while you dump them again?"

"I leave them to live their own lives in peace!" retorted the Doctor, annoyed.

Sherlock waved the objection away: "Clearly, one such companions has used your situation and personal history to make money by transforming it in a TV show."

"Seems like the most likely explanation," said the Doctor with an unhappy grimace. "Knew I should just stick to travelling solo."

He scanned more and more pages about the _Doctor Who_ series, scrolling them much faster than John could possibly hope to follow, and his expression became more and more grim.

"This is bad," he said darkly. "Oh, this is very, very bad."

"Well, in any case you'll have to deal with this at a later date," John said decisively.

Both Sherlock and the Doctor turned to look at him in surprise and even the Tardis emitted a questioning little chirrup.

John raised his chin defiantly: "You were here for a reason before I told you about this and I'll bet it's more urgent than a TV show that's gone on for nearly 50 years!"

The Doctor blinked, abruptly reminded of the metal chunk he'd examined a little earlier. "You might have a point," he admitted ungraciously.

Sherlock's eyes lit up with interest: "So what is it?" he asked eagerly. John smiled widely. Give his friend a mystery...

"None of your business," retorted the Doctor, striding towards the door. He flung the door open: "Now, if you don't mind, I'd appreciate you going. Can't leave the Tardis open for anyone to stumble in, even if she's disguised."

Sherlock snorted: "Disguised? Don't make me laugh."

"It is disguised!" argued the Doctor. "Its outer plasmic shell is designed to assume a shape which blends in with its surroundings, based on an instantaneous scan of the landing environment!"

Sherlock looked at him disapprovingly: "It looks like an outdated police phone box."

"Well, yeah, it got stuck like that some time ago, but I kind of like it," the Doctor replied nonchalantly.

"Not much of a chameleon circuit if it isn't working, though, is it?"

Another vicious spark of electricity was spat out perilously close to Sherlock's hand.

"Oi! Don't go insulting my Tardis," frowned the Doctor. "Anyway, I _like_ it!"

"Doesn't the fact that the 'disguise' is so noticeable defy its purpose?" insisted Sherlock, keeping a wary eye on the strange ship, but not relenting.

"It doesn't get noticed," retorted the Doctor smugly.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow.

"Look, let me tell you somethin' 'bout the human race. You put a mysterious blue box slap-bang in the middle of town, what do they do? Walk past it. You stupid apes never bother questionin' anything."

"...Can't argue with that."

The Doctor froze: "Really?"

"Most people are idiots."

"Knew you'd find something to bond over sooner or later," commented John sarcastically. "Right! So now we can go on to... what is it that we're doing anyway?"

"There is no we," exclaimed the Doctor, exasperated. "I'm just checking on a few things. I don't need any _help._"

"Oh, yes you do," countered John. "You wouldn't be here if there wasn't something afoot. You only ever show up when aliens are about to invade us or something equally tragic."

"Have you considered the possibility that this show of yours might be lying?"

"So you're here for a nice relaxing holiday?" asked John, raising an eyebrow.

Silence.

"Didn't think so," he said smugly.

"Alright, I might have picked up some weird activity around Hounslow..."

"Exactly, which means you need us," said John firmly. "Well," he amended, "you need Sherlock. He's amazing, he'll have it all sorted out in no time. I... usually just go along for the ride. Er. And then blog about it."

"You do much more than that, John. You're a conductor of light!" interjected Sherlock reprovingly.

The Doctor froze: "Sherlock."

"Yeah."

"And John."

"That's... me..." said John cautiously.

"Sherlock _Holmes_?"

"Have you heard of me?..." asked Sherlock, surprised.

There was an unexpected explosion of enthusiasm: "Oh my God, you're Doctor Watson!"

John was bewildered: "Yeah, I am..."

"I love your writings! I've read them all. Honestly, I'm quite the fan!" exclaimed the Doctor happily, coming around to grasp John's hand and shake it vigorously. "Never expected to find you now, though."

Sherlock groaned and hit his head repeatedly on the nearest strut.

John's eyes were wide and he whooped: "_The Doctor_ reads my blog!"

"Can we focus on what truly matters?" whined Sherlock. "Tell me what's going on!"

The Doctor scowled at him: "If I knew what was going on, I wouldn't need to investigate. Now stop your nagging, will ya?"

Sherlock glowered right back, but John grabbed his elbow. Painfully. This was something he was better suited to than his 'manners-are-a-waste-of-time' friend.

The consulting detective didn't look happy, but subsided.

"What started it all?" John asked with all the eager interest he usually reserved for Sherlock's cases.

It worked wonders: the Doctor looked at him with eyes that were suddenly wide and excited: "This! I picked up this signal emanating from an entire London district. It's artron energy! Well, a form of it. But the interesting thing is that it's _concentrated_!"

"Artron energy?" asked Sherlock, eyes narrowed in interest: "What is it?"

The Doctor pushed a couple buttons and whirled around, firing off rapidly: "Even at this point of your history you should be aware of what potential energy is – energy stored in a system of forcefully interacting physical entities. Now, the force field acting on a body that moves from a start to an end position can be defined by this potential energy if its work does not depend on the trajectory of the body, which means that potential energy can in turn be defined as the work done against a given force in changing the position of an object with respect to a reference position."

"The position of infinite separation," nodded Sherlock, easily following along.

John grimaced, feeling like a teenager trapped in a physics classroom again.

"If you sum the potential energy and the kinetic energy of an object, what do you obtain?" asked the Doctor in a leading way.

"Mechanical energy," was Sherlock's prompt reply: "the total energy associated with the motion and position of an object."

"But what happens if the start and end position aren't positions in the 3D space you're already familiar with, but rather in a higher dimensional space?" The Doctor regarded them for a long moment and then, grinning, exclaimed: "Exactly the same thing! Only instead of discussing mechanical energy, we're discussing artron energy. The energy associated with the motion and position of an object _actively_ travelling through time!"

"Fascinating," breathed Sherlock, mind alight with the possibilities implied in the explanation he'd just received.

John carefully avoided voicing his comments about bloody geniuses and the annoyance level they caused and tried his best to apply his Sherlock-to-average-human translation skills to this new challenge. He really wished he could remember a little more physics from his uni days.

"So, if I get this straight," he said aloud, looking dubious, "you only find this energy where someone travels in time?"

"Sort of." The Doctor moved to the other side of the control and fiddled with a couple levers, all the while talking: "Thing is, everything is moving through time, everything, everywhere, all the time, there are no points outside of time, everything is affected. So everything generates artron energy all the time."

"But for the objects that move according to the flow of time without actively contrasting it in any way, this energy would be standard. Unobtrusive. Insignificant," said Sherlock, continuing the explanation smoothly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. "Nothing much, nothing noticeable, just one more thing increasing the entropy of our universe. Part of the cosmic background radiation."

"Exactly!" said the Doctor, looking pleasantly impressed. "All lifeforms on every planet, including Earth, are exposed to it, it's ubiquitous; but also very uniformly and broadly spread. You wouldn't notice it in everyday life, the same way you don't notice the movements within the deeps of the sea while you're watching the waves. There aren't even any means to detect it on Earth, not for another three centuries at least."

"And you detected an anomaly in its distribution patterns?" asked Sherlock, mind whirring.

"Right again," replied the Doctor. "Very slight – barely two atto-Omegas – perfectly typical for Earth at this point in time but! Instead of being dispersed as background radiation, it's concentrated. It's like there are actual beams of it, being purposefully directed. Granted, all electromagnetical, gravitational and temporal waves can be polarized, but natural sources of them are always incoherent, they consist of a random mixture of waves having different spatial characteristics, wavelengths, phases..."

"While this is polarized," concluded Sherlock, "therefore it's not a natural phenomenon. It's... the temporal equivalent of a laser."

"Couldn't have put it better myself."

"What could cause this?" asked John, trying not to show that he'd given up on the explanation. Really, medicine was one thing. Temporal physics? Better leave that to Sherlock.

"I think, John, that the better question is 'who'," said Sherlock, piercing the Doctor with his penetrating gaze.

Serious, the Time Lord nodded, crossing his arms before his chest: "Quite so. Some species are more sensitive to it than others. Panjistri, Groske,… but many more are aware of it and capable of exploiting it. Normally it is used as a source of energy, but here..." he trailed off.

"A source of energy?" asked John, uncomprehending.

"The same way mechanical energy can be used to produce, say, electrical energy, I imagine," was Sherlock's cursory clarification.

The Doctor mmm-ed his agreement. "Problem is, I scanned the surroundings in search of an energy factory of some sort, but while there are some odd spikes in a couple places, none of the readings could possibly match something like that."

"I thought you didn't do scans for alien tech?" commented John in a joking tone.

The Doctor gave him an eye-roll: "I really need to have a _long_ chat with whoever created that show."

"It's a valid question, though," pointed out Sherlock. "Do you often scan London for alien signals? For that matter, what are you even doing in my city?"

"_Your_ city?" repeated the Doctor incredulously, but he went on immediately: "Oh, never mind that. I don't have time to quarrel with you apes."

Sherlock drew in his breath, outraged, but the Doctor paid him no mind: "For your information, I normally wouldn't bother, especially since it doesn't look dangerous. But I was bored."

"Oh, God, not another one!" moaned John.

Sherlock's incensed gaze swung to him.

"Which reminds me! I need to pick up a friend." The Doctor turned around and reached for a lever on one of the facets surrounding the central column

A sort of wheezing, groaning noise started up and John felt excitement rise up in him.

"What's that?" demanded Sherlock, half-alarmed and half-intrigued.

"We're moving!" exclaimed John in delight.

"Not much, just over to Powell Estate," corrected the Doctor absently.

"Rose?" guessed John.

The Doctor grimaced: "Remind me to have a chat with _you_ as well, about spoilers and reapers and whatnot, alright? Sooner the better. But yes, Rose. She's visiting with her mother." Another grimace. "Scary woman, that Jackie. She slapped me once." He looked still flabbergasted by it. Then he shrugged: "Made myself scarce as soon as they mentioned shopping."

"Wise man," commented John, delightfully amused.

"Soul of wisdom, me," grinned the Doctor.

"Are you sure it's a smart idea to have her coming?" was Sherlock's acidic comment. He worked best alone – well, apart from John, of course – and wasn't best pleased with having to share this fascinating investigation with yet another someone.

"Trust me, you do not want to face her wrath if we leave her out of this," replied the Doctor, neatly swiping John's mobile phone right out of his pocket.

"Ehi!" protested the blogger, but without much heat. It's not like Sherlock didn't do the same every other day, after all.

"Rose? Something's come up," the Doctor said into the phone. "Be ready to go in five minutes." He looked up at Sherlock and John and his face split in a wild grin: "The game's afoot!" he cried.

He snapped the phone shut and twirled around the console shouting: "Always wanted to say that. Oh, it's fantastic!"

Sherlock glowered at John, telegraphing loud and clear _this is your fault._ John ran a hair on the back of his head sheepishly.

A moment later the odd pulsating noise that hadn't really stopped so much as reversed its crescendo into a 'downward' series of wheezes stopped and the Doctor made for the door in his long, rangy stride, wrenching it open right on time to receive an enthusiastic flying hug from a pink and yellow blur, that resolved itself into a blonde girl wearing a pink hoodie.

Sherlock groaned in exasperation and started muttering to himself about sentiment and its uselessness.

"Ehi!" shouted Rose, extricating herself from the Doctor's arms and bouncing around a little. "Just who do you think you are anyway?!"

Somehow, she managed to glower and grin at the same time.

"Sorry," John called her attention and gave her a warm smile. "I'm John, and that's my best friend Sherlock. He... doesn't do domestic," he explained. His apologetic tone was utterly ruined by the undercurrent of laughter in his voice.

Rose snorted and shot a meaningful glance at the Doctor: "Yeah, I know the type."

The Doctor beamed his alien smile: "A man after my own hearts! Right then. Let's go!"

"Hearts?" mouthed Sherlock, intrigued.

John just grinned.

And the wheezing noise of trumpeting elephants accompanied them once more as the Tardis dematerialized, reappearing a moment later at the corner of a quiet street in a largely residential area.

"So what are we... investigating?" asked Rose with a beaming smile that John returned with equal enthusiasm: "Apparently, we have no idea."

"Oh, good. I like those best!"

"Me too," Sherlock let slip, surprising even himself.

"Let's go out and see!" the Doctor grinned madly and flung open the door.

They stepped out onto a nondescript junction between large, well-kept roads without much traffic. Trees on the sides, neat rows of semi-detached houses with large back gardens, an unpretentious pub called Windsor Castle in a corner.

"Bath Road," murmured Sherlock at once, turning around on himself. "Wellington Road North, Sutton Lane. We're in Hounslow West."

John looked up and recognized the elegant spire of St Paul's Church rising above the other buildings, a familiar visual landmark in this area of London.

They strode out more or less in a group, walking unhurriedly along Bath Road, taking in the sight of charming houses with bay windows, projecting porches and gable ends on one side of the road, and Victorian terraces with their ground floor shops and businesses on the other.

Red bricks and cream coloured render treatment walls dotted the series of cul-de-sacs branching off from the main road, where few people walked leisurely in front of large detached homes with leafy back gardens and setbacks deep enough to park a car.

"Anyone see anything strange?" asked Rose hopefully.

John stopped short and answered in a flat tone: "Yes."

Everybody swung their heads around, instantly focused by his response.

Two young sisters with pigtails and anklet socks in buckled shoes ran across the street, schoolbags dragged after them: both wore vivacious flared skirts with straps that went over the shoulders, covering white blouses. They looked as if they'd stepped right out of a Fifties postcard.

The younger stumbled a little and the elder turned to grab her hand, clearly yelling something: only, no sound was heard from them. As if they were watching them in a TV on the mute setting. They smiled at each other and ran off, disappearing without any fanfare a few meters further.

"Are they... ghosts?" whispered Rose, uncertainly.

"They aren't the only ones," pointed out Sherlock, whose eyes were jumping from place to place, seeking out the more and more numerous silent presences.

Here, two teenagers with bouffant hair and miniskirts were playing impromptu tennis, happily calling out to each other without emitting a single sound; there, a nanny in a modest black dress and pristine white apron pushed a wooden perambulator with huge, thin wheels; a little further away, two muddy boys with closely cropped hair and half-unfastened breeches laughed silently at each other, pelting an incongruously placed fence with mud and pebbles.

The Doctor's screwdriver was out and buzzing madly, but he didn't seem to be getting any substantial answers.

"Let's check how far it spreads," he ordered brusquely.

They ran up and down the neighbourhood. Noticing the lively patrons in all sorts of fashions, side by side without surprise, going in and out of historic pubs that were, in actuality, shut and boarded up. Taking in the way a supermarket next door to the Hussar Pub flickered and wavered, like static on a screen, and then was suddenly replaced by a chemist's, except that the woman in jeans and blouse coming out of it held plastic bags full of contemporary items and looked perplexed. Observing a man in loose fitting trousers that reached mid-calf and a ragged, whitish shirt belted with a cord as he came out to silently greet a rider sporting a luxurious, groomed beard and an elaborate cloak, arrived from nowhere and now dismounting from his horse.

Many people were noticing now, stopping and pointing, whipping out smartphones and cameras, wondering aloud whether this was an odd dream, a trick, a historical fair, a miracle, a tourist trap, the filming of a new movie, a publicity stunt...

There was a queue going all the way round the corner in front of an Odeon that didn't exist in contemporary London, whose posters promised the projection of 'A Hard Day's Night'; a really nice china shop overlapping a much more modern sports shop; a silently wheezing man huffing and puffing without sound as he busied himself around a luxurious Ford Consul, half-visible in 'Stanley Motors', while two elderly ladies discussed ferociously the possibilities of his really being poor, dear Sally's Frank, who'd died of a heart-stroke forty years prior and left her alone with that good-for-nothing son.

The little episodes were multiplying, springing up all over the place, some lasting barely a few seconds, others as much as ten minutes.

Here and there, in corners and alleys or in the middle of the street, children from different eras were playing with rags balls or speeding around on their go-karts, without a care for the cars stopping and honking at them. It was as if they didn't even see the vehicles forced to swerve abruptly to avoid them; and just like their yells and laughter didn't reach the watchers, the shouts coming out of the cars didn't catch their attention in the least. A rag-tag band of urchins, blissfully unaware of the drivers and passengers that stopped right in the middle of the road and got out to gape at them, faded into nothingness before the shocked watchers' eyes.

The four came to a halt in Montague Road and stared at the Hounslow Police Station, amazed at what they saw.

A small group of teenagers with earplugs dangling from their shoulders held up their smartphones, in an eerily similar mimicry of how a few medieval monks held up the wooden crosses linked to their rosary beams, their undyed scapulars seamlessly continuing the line of graphic t-shirts.

Behind them, a building rose, in the form of a cross with a great tower at the crossing, eclipsing the squared, ugly brick walls of the police station; as they watched, it changed slowly but surely, gaining and then losing again a huge entrance, guest accommodations, kitchens in two different places, arches decorated with stiff-leaf moulding, market stalls against its walls... until it was devoured by silent flames that didn't warm the air.

"It's beautiful!" sighed Rose, a little sadly.

"But what is it?" breathed John, eyes wide with wonder.

"It's the Priory. Holy Trinity Priory," said the Doctor quietly. "It has existed since the 13th century. Hounslow was centred around it, it's how it started: the Priory would offer accommodation to travellers and over the years, many inns sprung up around it for the same purpose... then other facilities for travellers heading to and from London, regular markets, a staging post..."

"Archaeological evidence of the Priory was found during excavations at Hounslow Police Station in 1995," murmured Sherlock. "Proof that it was built and rebuilt several times, the last after a fire in World War II."

The Priory rose once more in front of their eyes, starting the whole cycle again, like a video stuck on a loop.

They shared a glance and then, by unspoken agreement, continued slowly down the street, eyes wide, past a medieval butchers and a small cake shop full of schoolboys in Edwardian times uniforms and an ice-cream man handing over a lolly with an ice cream on the top to a rosy-cheeked girl in a pleated skirt and low slung belt, both utterly ignored by the serious woman with a bob cut and boyish figure that was passing right by them.

Every now and then, the Doctor held his trusted screwdriver high in the air and turned it slowly around, analysing his surroundings.

Sherlock muttered half-formed observations and quickly changing connections in mid-voice, almost non-stop.

Rose gaped at the diverse little scenes on display; she barely suffocated her scream when she found herself unexpectedly on the path of an old lorry, but it passed through her like a ghost and went on delivering coal to houses that were no longer there without affecting her or anything else.

John, for his part, was tense, with the unpleasant feeling that he was missing something crucial; but he lost himself completely in admiration of a blonde young lady, small, dainty and dressed simply in a sombre, greyish beige Victorian dress, untrimmed and unbraided, and a small dull turban with a pretty white feather in the side.

Her large blue eyes raised to meet his for a long instant, with a sweet and amiable expression; yet she appeared distressed: her lip trembled, her hand quivered, and she showed every sign of intense inward agitation.

She wasn't a conventional beauty; but John felt that he had never seen anyone quite as lovely. For a moment, he wished with a stab of pure longing that they could meet.

Then she was gone, vanished as any other ghost.

The Doctor's voice startled him out of his reverie: "Just Hounslow West, then," he commented, frowning a little at his sonic screwdriver.

"So it would seem," agreed Sherlock.

"Any ideas on the hows and whys... or at least the whats?" asked John.

"Too soon," was Sherlock's brief response.

No-one else spoke.

Barrack superstore was suddenly replaced under their eyes by a few men in shirts and suspenders trying to hang a sign that said simply 'Smith's' over an ironmongery; a woman in a light blue dress with a pristine white apron regarded them with a worried smile.

They, too, faded like nothing a little while later.

The four stood still, sharing occasional glances, each of them deep in thought.

Rose was the first among them to break their thoughtful silence: "Doctor! That man over there!..." she cried in shock. "That's Charles Dickens!"

He whirled around: "What? Where?! Uuh... you're right! It's Charlie! Looking younger than last time we met him, though. Wonder who's with him?"

Never one to be outdone, Sherlock interjected haughtily: "Probably his friend and solicitor, Thomas Mitton, who lived in Isleworth and Hounslow for over thirty years. Dickens paid frequent visits to him."

John muttered something uncomplimentary about deleting the solar system but not Dickens' friends' biography, but the Doctor beamed: "Of course! They met when Charlie was eighteen and working as a solicitor's clerk in Lincoln's Inn, Thomas Mitton was a trainee solicitor there. Ah, this is fantastic!" He crossed his arms and watched happily.

Sherlock hesitated for only a heartbeat: "You really know Charles Dickens?" he blurted out.

"They met in Cardiff," provided John, still a little grumpy.

"How do you know that?" asked Rose, surprised.

"Don't even ask," ordered the Doctor, snippy, and he gave her such a dark look that she faltered. A moment later he grinned so suddenly the change in expression almost gave her whiplash: "Oi! I remember that place!"

He pointed to a little 'house-window' business just across the street from them: "I came here in 1840 – or was that 1841? Anyway, I met this bloke – John Appleton; he was a metalsmith and retail ironmonger, a very good one, too. Managed to forge a spare piece for my Tardis exactly to my specifications. That's impressive, considering he'd never even heard of solenoids. Didn't ask too many questions, either. Very nice man. And he's over there," he pointed dryly.

They watched for a moment the thin but sturdy man with ginger sideburns coming out to dump a heavy basket to the side of the road, before returning inside and vanishing along with his shop.

Rose grabbed his arm and pointed the other way: "Who's that one?" she asked curiously.

She was watching a man with a hip-length cape slung elegantly over a shoulder and stiff breeches that were obviously fashionable for the XVII century: he was bowing courteously to a terrified looking woman in a richly embroidered but very uncomfortable looking bodice.

"Ah... well. Unless I'm very much mistaken, that is Claude Duval, one of the most romantic figures in the history of highwaymen. His gallantry endeared him to his female victims even while he was robbing them! They even put it on his tomb. _Here lies DuVall: Reder, if male thou art/ Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart,_" he quoted.

Sherlock nodded his agreement: "Local tradition says that he once stopped a coach on Hounslow Heath and found a nobleman and his wife, who played a tune on her flageolet-"

"What's a flageolet?" asked John and Rose together. She scowled when they were ignored and he just grimaced in sympathy, all too used to Sherlock's rudeness.

The consulting detective went on casually: "Duval admired her playing and said he was sure she danced equally well. The lady then agreed to dance with him..."

"...and then he let them go without robbing them?" asked Rose, feeling romantic.

Sherlock looked at her strangely: "No, he demanded £400 as payment for the dance."

Her face fell.

"I was at his execution," said the Doctor thoughtfully. "Tyburn, 1670. Oh, just passing through," he added hurriedly.

Eyebrows raised all around him: "Passing through?"

He grimaced: "Long story."

Rose started to say: "Doctor..."

But he was moving once more, saying blithely: "Plenty of long stories around here. And short stories, too. It's an interesting borough. Full of history."

"Oh, yes," agreed Sherlock, far too nonchalantly. "In the 18th century an aristocrat disposed of his wife's body in the Thames not far from here."

The Doctor glared at him askance: "Not what I was thinking of," he muttered. "Very peaceful place, this, in spite of all the travellers passing through. Quiet. There didn't use to be much at all, just worker cottages, a few farms... the coaching inn. It didn't really develop until the Metropolitan District Railway arrived."

"Mmm." Sherlock smirked. "One of the navvy murdered his brother in law during the construction works of the station, in 1838, by balancing some lumber unsteadily on a carefully arranged trowel, which he then connected, using wires, to the metal drainpipe of the scaffoldings, which he topped with a makeshift lightning rod, counting on the fact that their employers were slavedrivers who forced the men to work in any weather... Would probably have got away with it, too, if another man hadn't accidentally spotted him pushing his brother in law into the right position to be hit by the falling lumber. Always thought it was rather creative of him."

The Doctor turned to glare at him outright: "Average crime rate," he said defiantly. "Good place to grow up. A number of Olympic champions are from here, you know. Very sporty place, this."

"Mo Farah," volunteered John.

"Sarah Ayton," promptly added Rose.

"And actors, singers... painters!" continued the Doctor. "Vincent Van Gogh taught scriptures in Isleworth!" He pointed dramatically to the east, in the direction of the mentioned nearby area.

"What, really?" asked Rose, shocked.

"Soldiers," countered Sherlock. "There were the Barracks, here. The heath and its rivers provided waterpower and a safe place to manufacture gunpowder."

"And what's wrong with soldiers?" asked John in a dangerous tone.

Sherlock faltered, and John relented: "I imagine the Hounslow Heath was the ideal place for large scale training exercises, especially for cavalry. Plus, it's strategically important, what with being in between London, Windsor and Hampton Court."

"Yeah... It was also used as an encampment again and again," admitted the Doctor. "Oliver Cromwell marshalled his troops here at the end of the English Civil War. I never met Cromwell. We should go say hello, sometime," he told Rose.

"Or you could take me to a beach," muttered Rose, but without much heat.

The Doctor crossed his arms, a faraway look in his eyes: "To think that now, all that remains of four thousand acres of wilderness, brimming with wildlife and haunted by notorious highwaymen..."

"Is two hundred acres of nature reserve, with everything that goes with it – namely, a golf course," concluded Sherlock.

They all smirked at each other and fell silent once more.

The number of odd scenes from the past was dwindling now; the fewer and fewer remaining were fading fast, in just as unexplainable a way as they'd started.

The people who'd been entranced by the strange spectacle shook themselves out and went about their businesses once more, excitedly chatting about the unexpected happenings and speculating on the whys and wherefores.

"Show's over. Whatever it is, it's stopping." The Doctor had his sonic screwdriver in hand again, studying the readings of the disappearing phenomenon.

When the last 'ghost' in sight vanished quietly, John asked in a tightly controlled tone: "Alright. Just what is going on?"

* * *

_A/N: I have only a vague idea of what artron energy actually is in canon, so I'm making up my own explanation, cobbling together some stuff I learned in physics. Take it with a grain of salt._


	4. Aliens from the future,

**_Aliens from the future,_**

_When the last 'ghost' in sight vanished quietly, John asked in a tightly controlled tone: "Alright. Just what is going on?"_

"Holograms," stated Sherlock, with bed-rock surety.

"Not... quite..." The Doctor frowned at his sonic screwdriver some more, then whipped his head around to grin at them: "They're not real holograms, they just look and behave exactly like one."

"...Right," said Rose, deadpan.

The Doctor slanted a look at her: "Instead of sending a beam of high-intensity light through thousands of shifting pixels, whoever's doing this is using polarized artron energy tuned to specific resonating frequencies to elicit the residual psychic memories of the background temporal radiation."

"Any chance to have that in English?" asked John without much hope.

"It's like an LCD projector, John," said Sherlock, eyes alight with intensity. "Only they're using more than just the visible spectrum."

John turned to him and raised an eyebrow, secretly awed that his mad-genius best friend was managing to understand _the Doctor_ so easily.

"The goal is, in both cases, to project a picture in the air in 3D," Sherlock went on. "Do you know how an LCD projector does that?"

John shook his head, eyes riveted on his friend.

Sherlock spoke quietly, an anticipatory air about him: "Step one: a beam of intense, white light is emitted. Step two: the beam of light bounces off a group of dichroic mirrors, reflecting only specified wavelengths. Step three: the beams of separated red, green and blue light each pass through a liquid crystal display composed of thousands of tiny colourless pixels that allow light to pass through when triggered by an electric current. Step four: inside the LCD projector, the three tinted versions of the scene recombine in a finely crafted combination of four triangular prisms to form a single image composed of millions of colours. And _voilà!_ A vibrant, colourful version of the scene can be projected through a lens and onto a screen."

"Dich... what- mirrors?" asked Rose, sounding confused.

It was the Doctor who answered: "You know how a prism breaks a beam of light into a rainbow of colours?"

She nodded confidently.

"Dichroic mirrors only break off a single specified wavelength: the white light hits the mirrors and each reflects a beam of coloured light on through the projector, red, green and blue. The same principle can be applied to timewaves, by the way."

"Knew it!" muttered Sherlock, exultant. "Only, it isn't about splitting the colours, is it? And the reflected beams don't pass through a liquid crystal display..."

"No," agreed the Doctor. "Whatever they're using, it splits the unpolarized timewaves into rays with different resonating frequencies and then uses the mnemonic imprints of the temporal field's variations lingering in the visible surfaces to convert the timewaves into lightwaves, generating visual impressions of the past."

"Urgh, my head's hurting," complained John.

"Don't try and understand, just be ready to run," advised Rose sagely. "Makes your life easier. And longer."

The Doctor turned to her impatiently: "Structures can hold memories. That's why houses have ghosts. This is pulling those memories up and showing them. It's... some sort of time viewer. A chronoscope, so to say."

"Oh!" said John, suddenly understanding. "Like in Asimov, then? I get it. We're seeing the past reflected from surfaces."

"You and your sci-fi," muttered Sherlock, not as grouchy as he'd like them to believe.

"Is that even possible?" asked Rose in disbelief.

"Whether it's possible or not, it's happening," murmured the Doctor.

"Why only the past, though?" wondered Sherlock in a louder voice.

"Because it is _exactly_ like an LCD projector," replied the Doctor. "In the version your people have invented, all three of the pixels screens in the projector display the same image in grey-scale and when the coloured light passes through these three screens, they relay three versions of the same scene: one tinted red, one tinted green and one tinted blue. It's the meshing of the three that gives you the right colours in the final projection."

"But if one of the dichroic mirrors is broken, we get a final image heavily tinted instead of a normally-coloured one," continued Sherlock in a tone of sudden understanding. "And that's exactly what's happening here, isn't it? The imprints of the past and the tangible surfaces of the present act as screens for this huge projector, but only the rays from a certain set of frequencies are passing through it. We get the past version of the scene overlapping the present version provided by the natural passing of time and that's it. The mirror for the future is broken."

"Might not be broken, might just not be a feature, but... yeah, excellent explanation. Well done, you!" the Doctor exclaimed, impressed. "Also, there is only recent past."

"Recent?" asked Rose sarcastically. "I saw a butcher straight from the Dark Ages!"

"Exactly. Eight, nine centuries at the most. The history of Britannia is a lot longer than that – how come we see no Romans, for instance? What about the ice age? Clever apes making good use of stone and fire? _Pelorosaurus_ munching on long lost trees? Earth has existed for four and a half billion years." He smiled smugly at her: "Eight centuries _is_ recent." Suddenly, he frowned: "Of course, it's also impressively powerful."

"Why do you say that?" asked Sherlock, frowning.

"Because timewaves aren't only waves," said the Doctor succinctly.

"They're also particles, like light," said promptly John – at least he knew _something_, even if it was just a refrain he didn't really understand.

Sherlock, of course, had no such problems: "And therefore there is an inevitable amount of blurring," he concluded at once. He thought for a moment, then added: "It's probably why the most recent past produces longer spells of images."

"Oh! That's brilliant, that," said the Doctor, approvingly. "I hadn't noticed. Yes, yes... considering the relative length of the scenes we've witnessed... I'd say, an inverse power of six as the decay rate of resolution – the farther away from the point of image materialization, the less sustainable the process..."

He trailed off, fiddling with the settings of his sonic screwdriver and moving quickly and randomly up and down the closest side street, ignoring the three humans chasing after him and their insistent questions. Well, two humans' questions. Sherlock was busy checking his calculations with his own.

Suddenly, the Doctor stopped, the sonic screwdriver's point glaring with blue light. He observed it closely, then cursed.

"Found anything?" asked Rose, a little anxiously.

The Doctor shook his head with a frown: "I scanned for life forms in the area, filtering out the expected DNA sequences – human, of course, but also feline and canine, as well as all the common terrestrial insects, birds and scavengers. Nothing. It turns up nothing that is not supposed to be here."

"So whatever's doing this is not alive?" John.

"Or it's not there. It could be remotely controlled." Sherlock.

"Quite so," said the Doctor.

"But to what purpose?" asked Rose.

"I don't know yet, but this is bad. This is very, very bad," said the Doctor, looking grave. "Whatever it is, it's affecting the natural temporal decay of all living creatures in the artificial artron field," murmured the Doctor, focusing intensely on his screwdriver.

"What do you mean?" asked John, not quite understanding. "It's just waves, right? I mean, aside for the psychological implications of _viewing the past_, it's harmless... isn't it?"

The Doctor didn't answer, but Sherlock murmured: "Radiation."

"What!?" blurted out John. He paled as his medical mind easily called up the long, long list of symptoms and consequences of exposure to harmful radiations – nausea, vomiting, headache, loss of white blood cells, hair loss, damage to nerve cells and digestive tract lining cells, immunodeficiencies, haemorrhaging, fever, diarrhoea, long-term high risk of leukaemia, lung cancer, thyroid cancer, breast cancer...

"Alright, that's enough, thank you very much!" squeaked Rose, looking even paler than him.

John grimaced and apologized: he hadn't realized he'd been talking aloud.

"Doctor, do you believe we're about to face an onslaught of radiation sickness cases?" asked Sherlock with equanimity. He didn't seem remotely scared by the possibility. Intrigued, if anything.

John, on the other hand, was just this side of terrified and already going over a list of the few treatments available – blood transfusions could be organized, possibly, no, certainly, if Mycroft helped; bone-marrow transplants were probably out of the question...

The Doctor left the street abruptly and jumped over a low fence, making a beeline for the bow-window in a house nearby: through the squares of glass, a canary in a cage could be seen, singing feebly.

"You cannot see it with humans, the changes, even accelerated, are too slight for you to perceive," the Doctor said, while running his sonic screwdriver over the fixed hinges of the window to open it and reach inside, getting the canary out of its cage and holding it delicately in his hand. "But with creatures that are more short-lived..."

The canary was ageing under their very eyes. Its panting breaths, showing its upset at being caught, were wheezing; its breastbone seemed more and more prominent as it appeared to lose weight as they watched; its eyes grew foggy; the fluttering of its wing against the Doctor's hands weaker and weaker.

"What were the places?" asked Sherlock out of the blue.

They turned to him, uncomprehending.

"What places?" asked the Doctor.

"Earlier, you said you had detected 'odd spikes', not consistent with an energy factory but strange nonetheless, in 'a couple of places'. What places?" he demanded impatiently.

"The Holy Trinity Church we passed earlier and Treaty Centre on High Street," replied the Doctor, frowning. "But neither place shows any peculiarity anymore."

"We'll split up, then. You two go check out the church, we'll take the library. John, let's go!"

He strode off without waiting for acknowledgement.

"Hold on a minute!" shouted the Doctor after him. He grimaced when Sherlock simply kept walking briskly.

John sighed and gave the Doctor and Rose an apologetic look: "We'll be back as soon as possible," he assured them, and hurried after the consulting detective.

The Doctor cursed, then gently returned the dying canary to its cage and closed the window, casting a dark gaze at Rose.

She smiled tentatively at him and he couldn't help grinning back as he grasped her hand tight and dragged her off.

Not ten minutes later, Sherlock and John were marching up to the Library on the first floor of the Treaty Shopping Centre, because Sherlock had taken one look around the ground floor and somehow deduced that whatever they were looking for, was going on in the basement.

Why, that being the case, they were running _up_ some stairs instead of _down,_ was a little beyond John, but he was too used to Sherlock's unorthodox methods to worry too much.

The library was spread out over the floor and beautifully luminous even so close to sunset, but with an overall shabby appearance, probably due to the poorly kept carpeting. However, John barely got a glimpse of the spacious area, before he zeroed in on Sherlock, who was flashing a suspiciously familiar leather-bound paper at a stern-looking, copper-haired employee, declaring himself a Health and Safety Inspector and proceeding to half-charm, half-bully her into taking them to the storage rooms in the basement.

As she moved through shelves and tables, showing them the way to the staff-only stairs, he caught up with his friend and grabbed his arm: "Hold on," he whispered in urgent disbelief. "That's the Doctor's psychic paper!"

Sherlock glanced at him in irritation: "That's a stupid name."

"So not the point," hissed John.

He was, not altogether surprisingly, ignored; but that seldom stopped him these days.

"Sherlock! You stole the Doctor's psychic paper!"

"Why are you so upset?" retorted Sherlock, sounding frustrated. "You're never this upset when I lift Lestrade's badge. "

John opened his mouth to retort, realized abruptly that his friend was right, and closed it.

Another employee, this time a fatty man with a disgruntled expression, was coming up with a cardboard box in his arms.

"Oh, Dave, good, you can handle these gentlemen," said their guide with relief, stopping on a step; she ignored the man's indignant grumblings and patted John's arm as she passed them on her way back up: "I'm sure you don't need me anymore, do you?"

She didn't wait for an answer.

"Now see here!" shouted the fatty man, shifting the box to a side and looking even more disgruntled.

Sherlock breezed past him arrogantly: "Safety at Work," he threw over a shoulder, waving the psychic paper again. "Checking out things, might have some questions later, don't wander off," he rattled off authoritatively, without glancing at him, nor breaking his stride.

The poor man just nodded dumbly and pressed himself against the wall to let John pass, dissatisfied but too bewildered to protest.

"You're going to use and abuse that like there's no tomorrow, aren't you?" muttered John, resigned.

Sherlock smirked, and John scowled: "First chance we get, you'll give that back!" he said in a tone that brooked no argument.

"I was planning to do a few tests..."

"Absolutely not!"

Sherlock pouted.

The examination of the storage rooms didn't take anywhere near as long as John expected, though it probably would have if Sherlock wasn't so incredibly observant. John would certainly never have noticed that the out of order elevator on the side... couldn't be a elevator.

"Honestly, John," huffed Sherlock. "It's in an absurd place for an elevator – the structural integrity of the whole building would be compromised if it was really there. Not to mention that on the floors above this, the elevators are in an entirely different place. Obviously, it's some sort of disguise. Really, don't you ever observe?"

Sure enough, what to the eyes were elevator doors, to the touch were instead a simple metal door, identical to all the others in the basement; and beyond that, they found a rather ordinary room with shelves and boxes haphazardly pushed to the corners to make room for a big, oval table and a number of oval stools around it.

Sherlock dropped to his knees under the nearest stool, magnifying glass in hand, and carefully scraped off the floor crumbles of reddish-brown crunchy stuff that vaguely reminded John of crisps.

For his part, the blogger approached the table and cautiously picked up a flexible sheet of soft, slightly sticky material, textured with embossed angular lines. "Looks like silicone scar sheets," he muttered.

Sherlock examined it curiously: "Looks like a document of some sort," he corrected. "See this pattern? It's repeated here, and here, but here has a different ending, which is in turn repeated several times, in association with other roots... I believe, John, that their grammar might not be so different from ours, in structure."

John gaped: "What?"

"I will have to examine this more closely to determine if their biology is any close to ours, however. If this is edible for humans as well, then..."

"Hold on, hold on – edible? Sherlock, what are you on about?"

Sherlock raised an eyebrow condescendingly: "Surely you can see that this is a buyer-seller meeting room?"

"What? No, I can't see it!" exclaimed John, but even as he was saying it, he realized that, yeah, maybe, in fact, it could possibly, probably, very likely...

"I cannot, of course, be one hundred percent sure," admitted Sherlock, looking dissatisfied. "Cultural differences and all that. I cannot account for it, so I _might_ be wrong. Still! It makes sense." He nodded briskly and whipped out his phone.

"Does it?" asked John, half-dazed.

He looked around again, taking in the arrangement of furniture, walking about to try and see what Sherlock was seeing; he found and collected two more silicone-like sheets covered with – well, yes, he supposed it did look like writing; and scooped up some orangey hairs from a couple of the stools.

"Wait," he said suddenly. "Are you saying that that brown crunchy stuff is actually... alien crisps?"

For some reason, he found the idea hilarious - but thankfully he managed not to giggle. This was, after all, a crime scene. Of sorts.

"This is useless!" cried Sherlock suddenly. "There's quite a number of those orange hairs around – obviously that is a characteristic of the species. Yet even accounting for the possibility of different colouring in a pattern similar to human hair and skin, there isn't a species listed here that could fit. They have to be humanoids, given the kind of furniture they use and their probable proportions, but they also have claws – see the marks there and there? Then again, quite a number of aliens seem to have claws. That hardly narrows it down."

John goggled at him: "What are you on about?"

"Whoever devised this show of yours did a very poor job in terms of xenobiology research!"

"Are you seriously complaining about a TV show being inaccurate in its representation of alien life forms?" asked John blankly.

Sherlock glared at his smartphone. "This database is completely useless, John. It doesn't even let me determine with any certainties if there was only one species involved."

John massaged his forehead wearily: "What are you talking about?"

"It might be wrong to attempt to pin every clue on one species. What if there were more involved? Might there have been an inter-species meeting here? Impossible to tell one way or another. It could have, though. To what purpose? An alliance perhaps? Business dealings? What?!"

He threw his hands in the air: "No info on the socio-political state of this galaxy anywhere, how am I supposed to draw conclusions without a reference context?" he ranted.

John gaped. "Hold on. Hold on! Socio-political state of this galaxy... Sherlock! How do you even know about how many species have claws?"

The genius raised his smartphone mockingly, showing John the home page of _Tardis_ _Data Core_, the _Doctor Who_ wiki. Obviously, he'd been browsing to get himself up to date.

"This ridiculous database is even more unreliable than Cosmopolitan UK!" he complained.

There really was nothing John could say to that.

Somehow, they found themselves back in 221B Baker Street, Sherlock setting up a series of experiments on the possibly-alien-crisps, and the likely-alien-documents, and also on the psychic paper (though carefully out of John's sight), and John making tea and cursing his idiocy in forgetting to get the Doctor's or Rose's number. They swung by the Tardis and left a note pinned to the door before catching a cab, but a phone call would really have been much more practical.

"_Mastocarpus stellatus_," declared Sherlock after a while, "and quite a lot of polyunsaturated fat and linoleic acid – grape seed oil, if I'm not mistaken."

John raised an eyebrow: "The alien crisps?"

"Alien crisps made of Irish moss rather than potatoes," agreed Sherlock, while contemplating a little bit of the reddish-brown crumbs thoughtfully. Then, to John's horror, he threw it in his mouth, tasting it with concentration.

"What the hell are you doing!?" yelled John

Sherlock rolled his eyes: "They're perfectly safe, John, I made sure of that." But finding himself speared with Doctor John Watson's strongest _I'm-your-doctor-you'll-listen-to-me-or-you'll-regret-it_ glare, he wisely allowed his friend to fuss, checking his vitals all the while grumbling about careless idiocy under his breath.

The bell ringing downstairs interrupted them, to Sherlock's secret relief, and Rose and the Doctor barged in, followed by a worried-looking Mrs. Hudson.

"Is everything alright, dears?" their landlady asked, eyeing the Doctor's manic grin distrustfully.

"Interesting case, Mrs. Hudson, nothing to worry about," John hastened to reassure her and gently herded her back to the stairs.

"Oh, well, very good then. Have fun!" she called over her shoulder, going back down.

The Doctor's eyebrows raised in surprised admiration at her retreating form, then he turned around and proclaimed without preambles: "We've got them."

"So what are they called?" Sherlock asked with too much nonchalance.

"What?" asked the Doctor, a bit surprised.

"The humanoid, orange-haired aliens with short legs and elongated torsos that left claw marks all over the furniture in the meeting room we found at the Treaty Center," said Sherlock matter-of-factly. "They aren't on the TV show database."

"Thank goodness for small mercies," blurted out the Doctor with feeling.

"Wait. You saw them?" asked Rose, surprised.

"No."

"Then how do you know...?"

Sherlock raised an elegant eyebrow: "Given the relative proportion of the furniture there, the remnants of food items and body sheddings we collected, the height and placement of the scratches in the room and the impressions we noticed on the furniture, it's obvious, really."

Rose gaped: "You figured out what some random aliens look like just by looking at a room they were in?"

"Yes."

"That's brilliant!" she exclaimed with honest delight.

Sherlock stared at her, stunned.

John chuckled.

"Well, this confirms it. I was uncertain, but the orange hairs narrow it down enough," said the Doctor with satisfaction. "Dirulinians!"

Everybody looked at him expectantly.

He crossed his leather-clad arms and explained: "Rather unscrupulous race. They'll sell you breath from your own lungs if you aren't careful."

Rose giggled.

"Of course, they don't have claws," he went on. "Their neighbours though, the Skiloners? _They _do."

Sherlock scowled. "Always something," he muttered, disgruntled.

"Neighbours?" asked John.

"Same solar system, next-door planet. Like Earth and Mars," clarified the Doctor easily. "Only Skilon is a lot closer to their sun, which is why Skiloners are a mostly nocturnal race. They're shorter and leaner - and more upright by far. Must have been a trade set-up between the two races. I told you, Dirulinians will sell anything..."

"Well, they're selling our past," said Rose grimly. She waved one of the not-scar-sheet documents, showing them it was a flyer.

Sentences like _history brought alive, price available upon request _and _quaint corner of the universe _jumped to John's eyes in flowing English script and once more he felt an irresistible - and rather inappropriate - urge to burst out laughing.

"You can understand that?" demanded Sherlock, his intense gaze boring into Rose.

"Well, yeah," she answered, surprised. "Can't you? You should, I mean... it's the Tardis, you know? Translates for you."

"What do you mean?" asked the consulting detective sharply, snatching the flyer from her hand and looking it over with increasing incredulity. "It's English!"

John, having a sudden bad feeling about this, hurriedly tried to say something, but the Doctor beat him to it, blithely explaining: "It's a gift of the TARDIS, a telepathic field that gets inside your brain — translates over five billion languages."

He grinned.

Sherlock did not.

"Your ridiculous ship is inside_ my mind_?" he yelped, appalled.

Three exclamations burst out of his current companions in unison: "Oy! Mind your tongue! My ship ain't ridiculous!" - "Hey! Don't insult the Tardis!" - "Sherlock! Manners!"

Sherlock looked even more appalled, but the Doctor didn't leave him time to protest further.

"Anyway, we've found the place where they set up the mainframe chronoscope - pretty obvious hiding place, really..."

"An elevator in a church's basement, honestly!" grinned Rose, in mock disappointment.

"Also, I've found their ship," added the Doctor merrily.

"What?" exclaimed John.

"Their ship," he repeated blithely. "It's in geosynchronous orbit over London."

"I thought you looked for it before. How did you miss that?" frowned Sherlock, still miffed. Part of him was trying to hastily check his mind palace for foreign interference, but the conversation going on kept distracting him. "Come to think of it, how did our astronomers miss that?"

"Well, I didn't know they had chronoscopic technology then, did I?"

"What has that got to do with anything?"

"It makes the ship look like an asteroid because that's what it once was!" exclaimed the Doctor, beaming. "It's fantastic!"

"Cool," agreed John.

"So now, all we have to do is stop their operations, wreck the equipment to the point where it can't contaminate current human technology levels, fix the damage they've done with their modulated artron field and talk them out of trying this stunt again!" He beamed smugly at the room at large.

Sherlock looked at him incredulously: "Talk them out of…? You want to _talk _to them?"

"Yup."

"And you truly think it'll be of any use?"

"Can't imagine why not."

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

John saw Rose's amused gaze dance to his behind the two geniuses' backs and realized he wasn't the only one trying to stifle giggles that would inevitably be met with indignation.

Suddenly, the former army doctor was struck with an overwhelming feeling of absurdity.

There they were, his unbelievable best friend and a fictional pair of legends - and him - strategizing how to stop a bunch of greedy aliens who wanted to touristically exploit Earth's past... and all around them, their usual weird collection of untidy odds and ends, black bison skull with headphones and smiley on the wall and shapeless couch and all, which didn't really help to make the situation any more likely.

He met the empty gaze of the skull on their mantlepiece and felt almost a wave of vertigo.

The word 'unreal' danced through his mind.

It was accompanied by the word 'fantastic', though.

Somehow, a map of Hounslow had appeared in the Doctor's hands from possibly nowhere and he was displaying it over their small table, carelessly pushing papers, trinkets and empty mugs aside to make room for it.

"What did you find at the Treaty Centre?" was asking the Doctor briskly.

John listened distantly.

"Nothing to be concerned about," was Sherlock's testy reply.

The Doctor glared.

Sherlock glared right back: "Meeting room. Those flyers. Nothing of importance." He waved it away with a careless hand. "No reason for them to return there at this point, is there?"

"Probably not," the Doctor admitted grudgingly. "Still. It's uncanny. See?"

Sherlock and Rose bent closer to look at what he was pointing out.

"I think I'll make tea," said John, feeling the need for something familiar to soothe the unsettledness he was feeling.

Sherlock's head snapped up to stare at him: "Tea?" he asked incredulously.

"Yeah," he nodded slowly, warming to the idea. "Tea'll do me good."

"Awesome!" exclaimed the Doctor happily. "Love a good cuppa, me."

"Me too, please," said Rose with a warm smile.

John nodded and moved to the kitchen on autopilot.

Sherlock, who'd stopped his glaring at the Doctor in favour of staring at them all in disbelief, inquired very calmly: "Have you all gone mad?"

His voice floated to John in the kitchen, where his hands were flying through the very familiar movements of tea-making.

"Reckon we've been mad for years," Rose replied cheekily. Even without seeing her, John could tell she was smirking. "My mum certainly thinks so."

"Oi!" protested the Doctor without heat.

John grinned. Oh, well - if this was all a mad dream, at least he was having fun!

And suddenly at peace with the collection of impossibilities in the next room, he went about doctoring everybody's tea cheerfully.

"This makes sense. Oh! This makes perfect sense!" the Doctor was exclaiming when he brought the mugs into the living room. "Look at where it all is."

A vivid pink highlighter was fished out of a pocket and he busied himself tracing crosses and borders on the map. Everybody leaned in to watch carefully.

"So the engine of the whole operation is in the church, and there's a PR centre in the local library, right?" he commented, tapping the back of the highlighter on the map lightly. "And this is the extent of the area influenced by the chronoscope. See what I mean, yet?"

"The 'PR centre' is perfectly central," Sherlock replied promptly.

"Looks like it," agreed Rose, while John nodded.

"Exactly. Perfect place for me to act."

"And do what, exactly?" asked Sherlock snidely. "Set up a parlay? Because it seems to me, that our main objective should be to stop the - what did you call it? 'The engine of the operation'. Not to waste time trying to contact-"

"That's not wasting time," the Doctor cut him off, "and I wasn't talking about negotiating with them anyway. Not yet at least - we've got to stop them first; pretty stupid to hope they'll just do it on their own."

"Then what are you talking about?" scowled the consulting detective.

"Reversing the deleterious effects of the residual temporal radiation, of course."

Sherlock started imperceptively.

"So... no more radiations sickness?" clarified John, whose stomach was still slightly churning at the idea. At the Doctor's nod, something inside him unclenched and he sighed in relief, taking a sip of his tea, which suddenly tasted better than ever.

"You claim you can just do this? Reverse the effects, fix it all?" asked Sherlock, without bothering to conceal his scepticism.

The Doctor regarded him seriously: "Not entirely, no. What has already happened has happened. Can't undo it. But!" His beaming smile returned with a vengeance: "I can stop it going any further and so far, it's been so light – months at the most, really - no human will notice any ill effects at all!"

Sherlock pursed his lips, unconvinced, but John brushed off any further objections: "Good enough, Doctor. How can we help?"

The Doctor turned his smile to him: "Figure you'd like to do what your partner wants to, and stop the mainframe chronoscope. How's that?"

John grinned back widely. Sherlock crossed his arms rather petulantly.

"So you and me, we go about fixing the radiation business, while the two of them go blow up that chronoscope thingie?" asked Rose, trying not to sound disappointed.

"Not blow up!" protested the Doctor. "Just... stop it. Was thinking more like cutting the power off... Should put a spanner in the works, that. Catch their attention, too. And that's all we need, really. Then we can talk them out of this nonsense."

"That's still a ridiculous idea. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that your plan will work. You want us to cut the power of an alien device off, something we have no idea how to do I might point out, correct? While you set up device in the Treaty Centre, to counter the residual artron radiation field, I assume?" asked Sherlock coldly.

"Yup!"

"It would be more logical for John and I to handle that part, since we have already run reconnaissance in the area, not to mention that it would probably be easier to handle a device you can explain to us beforehand."

"Well yeah. But then John wouldn't get to use this!"

He spun abruptly, throwing something small at John, who caught it in mid-air without thought. "What...?"

"I can't give you my sonic screwdriver, sorry," the Doctor said matter-of-factly.

John mock-pouted.

"But!... I can let you use... that!"

He gestured dramatically to the curved device that was blinking up orange lights at John.

"It's a Marpesian anticalalyst shell. Sort of. I tweaked it a little bit, but that's not important. It's like a grenade, you do know how to use a grenade, I hope?"

John rolled his eyes: "Army doctor, here," he reminded.

"Good. This is a grenade that will work as a temporal inhibitor. Considering what their technology is built on, the effect should be a complete black out."

"Then why don't we just use that on their ship and be done with it?" asked Rose grimly. "The Tardis could take us there."

The Doctor shot her his _sometimes-I-wonder-how-you-humans-managed-to-achieve-sentience-at-all _look: "Because then they would be stuck here and we don't want that, do we?"

"Besides it would only be temporary," added Sherlock impatiently. "Someone would be sent after them, or to investigate, or whatever. We need a more permanent solution to this problem."

"Right. Of course. Knew that," muttered Rose, fidgeting a little.

"So, everybody up to speed with the plan? Yes? Fantastic!" And just like that, the Doctor disappeared highlighter and map into his pockets and marched out of the room, Rose running after him with a startled squeak.

John hesitated a long instant, while Sherlock grumbled about irritating aliens and silly fangirls all the way through getting his coat and scarf on, but he finally made a beeline for his gun and loaded it with practiced ease.

He tried to ignore the feeling that he was being disloyal to the Doctor somehow, because it simply didn't make sense. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst," he muttered philosophically. Anyway, he was a _soldier_. And there was nothing wrong with that, whatever the Doctor's opinion on weapons.

Sherlock was looking at him with peculiar intensity, trying to figure out his uncharacteristic behaviour, but John just gazed back at him levelly: "Ready?"

With an unconvinced sniff, Sherlock stalked out into the night.

They took a cab and were soon deposited in front of the Holy Trinity Church: a rather ugly, modern building with a tall tower of brown bricks and white concrete slabs, upon which two angular stone angels jerkily faced each other above a sign that looked very blue in the white light of the street lamps.

Making their way inside took a touch of burglary, but navigating the main sanctuary in the dark was easier than John had expected, the light of Sherlock's torch falling briefly on the stone altar, the rail behind which the choir stood, the painted nativity on the side, the gleaming organ pipes.

Finding the basement littered with whirring machines and scattered cables John couldn't even begin to make head or tails of was the work of a minute and he didn't waste any time activating the temporal inhibitor either.

It was as they were making their way outside again that Sherlock went abruptly still.

"John, I am such an idiot!" he hissed. "That... that... _alien_, tricked me!"

"What are you on about now?"

"They're there! Don't you see?" spit the consulting detective, looking outraged and chagrined at once.

"No," was the blogger's concise answer.

Sherlock shook his head sharply: "I don't blame you, John. I didn't either! He said it, John. He _said _it! They're a nocturnal race! Oh, how could I have been so stupid?"

"Noct... oh! You mean- oh, no. They're there, aren't they? They must be closing the deal even as we speak!"

"That's why he wanted to be the one there... why he was so interested in the 'PR centre', as he called it! He's there confronting them and he tricked us into coming here to do the boring legwork instead! Argh!" The consulting detective grabbed his own hair, furious at himself as much as at the Doctor.

"Come on, John!" he shouted and took off at a run, his friend close on his heels.

Adrenaline was coursing through his body when they raced up to the Treaty Centre and John couldn't have hidden his wide grin if his life had depended on it. God, but he loved this part of their lives.

The entrance doors had, very thoughtfully, been left ajar and by the looks of it, the security system was well and truly disabled: the way to the hidden room they'd explored that afternoon was clear and they barely slowed down as they darted through the hall and down the stairs.

They quickly located the door disguised as an elevator again. Oddly high-pitched, whiney voices drifted out of it and the two friends hurried there.

They were met with the sight of the Doctor looming forbiddingly over three tall but cowering forms. They were sort of humanoid, but with a pea-green tinge to their skin and, as Sherlock had deduced, had very elongated torsos and proportionally short legs. Their heads, shoulders and arms were covered in hairs, all different shades of orange, giving them a bit of a leonine appearance, aided by their very large, flat noses.

John didn't even try and stop himself from staring. It wasn't everyday you saw pale green lion-like humanoids in powder blue business suites, after all.

"We didn't do anything wrong!" one of them was wailing.

"You might as well own up. Your business partners have gone and fled, if you haven't noticed. They'll spread the rumour about me, too. Doubt you'll find someone else willing to strike a deal, now."

"What were you even thinking, coming here with this much alien technology?" That was Rose. "I might not know much, but I do know that's against the rules."

"But this is the perfect place for a demonstration!" burst out one of the aliens in a high-pitched whine. "Long enough history to make a show of it, primitive enough that they won't interfere!"

"Only that's not quite true, is it?" demanded the Doctor roughly.

The three aliens rubbed their upper limbs frantically along their sides, in a gesture that was totally alien but somehow managed to transmit a sense of embarrassment to John.

He briefly wondered if the Tardis was translating body language as well, but the thought drifted to nothing because Sherlock was marching into the room, coat lapels turned up, looking as forbidding as the Doctor himself.

Two of the alien started tapping a foot hurriedly in what, for a human, would have been a gesture of impatience, but from them, conveyed instead fearful nervousness.

"I believe the lady asked you a very valid question," the consulting detective said in his smooth baritone. "Would you care to answer?"

More limb-rubbing.

"It's cheap," blurted out one of them in a mewl.

Sherlock's eyes narrowed dangerously.

"We aren't doing anything wrong!" the snivelling alien insisted. "It's just a bit of business. Nothing wrong with it!"

"Of course not. You want to use this planet as base of operations for your company, that's fine." Ignoring the surprised looks he was receiving, Sherlock straightened to his full height, towering over the creatures, and stalked slowly forward, like a panther closing in on its prey: "What I want to know, is how soon you're planning to get up to date on your payments. Because you seem to have forgotten _taxes_."

Three pale green jaws fell open in a very human gesture of incredulity: "What?"

The Doctor muttered: "Oh, that's clever!" and took a half-step back, crossing his arms with a wide grin and leaving Sherlock into the limelight.

In his most condescending drawl, the consulting detective informed them primly: "Don't worry. The United Kingdom has an open, transparent and business-friendly system to encourage the formation of new businesses and an overall lightly taxed economy compared to other regions of our planet. All you have to do is register with Her Majesties Revenue and Customs as an overseas company – or overskies, as it were."

"What!?"

"The current corporation tax rate is 24 per cent," went on Sherlock, undeterred. "Value added tax is due on all goods and services supplied within our jurisdiction as well as on the importation and acquisition of foreign goods and services..."

"You can't be serious!" the three aliens yowled.

Sherlock regarded them with cold eyes: "I am perfectly serious. I expect you to get all your documents in order post-haste, gentlemen."

"But this is ridiculous! We came here precisely so we wouldn't have to pay...!"

"Seems to me, you came to the wrong place," commented Rose, fighting down a grin.

One of the aliens tried to rally and squared his shoulders determinedly: "We _won't_-"

The Doctor stood to his full height, storm clouds darkening his eyes frightfully: "This is a Level 5 planet," he told them severely. "Galactic law states clearly that the economic exploitation of the natural or cultural resources of a Level 5 planet must be conducted in accordance with planetary law!"

"But...!"

"If you refuse to comply, I will have no choice but to bring the matter to the attention of the Shadow Proclamation!" he thundered.

"You can't! They'll embargo us! We'll be ruined!"

"Of course," intervened John, with a pretend show of generosity, "you can always renounce your choice to do business on our land. We might be willing to waive what you already owe us if that's the case..."

"I don't see why we should, John," protested Sherlock swiftly. "After all, they have already been setting up some company holdings here..." He gestured around them, still gazing at them with merciless, icy eyes.

John pretended to ponder this: "I suppose you're right."

Looking from Rose's smirk, to John's impassive face, to Sherlock's shark-like expression, to the Doctor's steely gaze, the three entrepreneurs crumbled quickly.

"We should have gone to Pen Haxico 2!" moaned one of them mournfully.

The Doctor grinned, amused: "Yes, yes you should have."

All in all, it took very little time to send them packing and the Doctor did get around to set up the countering of the residual artron field radiation, while Sherlock, superb actor that he was, played the ruthless fiscal agent with pitiless efficiency, never once letting the mentions of things such as the InterGalactic Bank Clan, datacom-net systems and the probable conversion rate of credits to pounds openly faze him, much to the dejected resignation of the three alien businessmen.

Afterwards, somewhat to the Doctor's grumbling, Sherlock insisted on a cab to get back; inside it, silence reigned for a long moment, until John was unable to restrain himself any longer.

"Sherlock Holmes, Defender of Her Majesty's Government Revenue, saving the Earth by taxing space invaders!" The mirth in his voice was unmistakable.

When Sherlock turned a sour look on him, he went for the kill: "Mycroft would be so proud."

His best friend looked positively ill at the idea.

Back to an alley not far from their flat, where the Doctor had parked the Tardis, John took a last chance at admiring the wonderful ship and stood with a gentle smile under the graceful, vaulted expanse of the control room, head tilted back to watch the softly pulsating central column all the way up to the ceiling.

The Doctor was dancing about the console, as he was wont to do, busying himself with the preparations for takeoff, while Rose was on the phone with her mother.

"Are you leaving, then?" asked Sherlock from the doorstep, where he stood rooted and glaring distrustfully at the coral struts. "There will be questions, I expect, that you might want to be around to answer."

The Doctor straightened and turned to him, arms folded over his chest: "Questions! I hate questions. Sticking around for the tiding up is not my style. You'll manage just fine."

Sherlock sneered, but didn't comment.

"Unless, of course," the Doctor added, leaning his hip against the edge of the console, "you two want to come along?"

"What?!"

It came in unison from the two Londoners, one in delighted shock, the other in appalled horror.

John was tempted. Sherlock could see it clear as day. He was longing to accept and fear seized the consulting detective's heart so strongly - and so completely unexpected - that he almost gasped. Immediately, he set to suffocate it with ferocious determination and frantically attempted to retrieve the icy walls that had always shielded him from this kind of pain. Even if he knew it was already too late.

But to his amazed surprise - and never to be voiced gratitude - John's expression fell quickly from longing to rueful, then to content.

"Nah... thanks, but- maybe some other time, hm? Just... don't be a stranger, alright?" He grinned at the alien, warmly and friendly and oh-so-John.

The Doctor regarded him thoughtfully, then nodded in acknowledgment and what Sherlock was almost sure was respect. Rose just gave John a hug and waved at Sherlock happily, seeing the two of them out of the inconceivable ship (whose very existence was still giving Sherlock a headache) and closing the unnerving wooden doors behind them.

Later, after they'd watched the impossible blue box disappear from that London alley in a crescendo of trumpeting sirens and pulsating light, the two walked leisurely back towards 221B Baker Street, enjoying the cooling down time in the familiar lights of the London night.

And Sherlock _had _to know.

"Why didn't you go with him?" he blurted out.

John blinked, perplexed: "What?" He half-laughed: "Don't be ridiculous, Sherlock!" he said with an incredulous shrug. "You'd never leave London."

"Of course I wouldn't, but... oh. _Oh._"

The consulting detective stopped short and stared at his friend, amazed.

John looked back uncomprehendingly. As if he'd just said the most logical and natural thing in the world, and not the most earth-shattering.

Sherlock stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and not-quite-smiled, starting to walk again.

"Dinner?" he asked, because that was what the two of them did.

And sure enough, John promptly answered: "Starving."

Ten minutes later, the doctor turned blogger was risking a cracked rib from the effort of not laughing while he watched Sherlock put the Doctor's psychic paper to good use to pass them off as hygiene inspectors and get their Chinese for free.


	5. The day the Earth died

**_The day the Earth died in a ball of flame._**

"Brilliant! Oh, yes! Nine hundred plus years and I've never seen the like!"

The three friends pivoted to face the unexpected voice, wands drawn and ready. As they had countless times during the war, the two tall frames of Harry and Ron enclosed Hermione's more petite body, their arms unwavering as they kept their wands trained on the possible threat.

A slim, handsome man with thick brown hair and pale skin scattered with freckles grinned at them and leaned forward to examine Ron's wand closely, without taking his hands out of his ankle-long tan coat pockets. Underneath it, he appeared to be wearing a brown suit with blue pinstripes, a light blue shirt, a tie and... Converse shoes.

Surprised by his muggle attire as much as by his words and attitude, the three exchanged quick, confused glances.

None of them dropped their guard, though. Painful experience had taught them better and anyway, they had just been forced to _reducto _in self-defence – the dust was still settling – a golden... man (possibly) wearing a weird, white and gold blotched skin suit, which had somehow transformed into a mass of tentacles and lashed out at them. Circumspection was just common-sense under the circumstances, really.

"How did you do that?" the stranger asked quite cheerfully.

Hermione, by unspoken agreement the diplomat of the group, asked cautiously, but politely: "What are you referring to, sir?"

"That axonoid. I saw you blow it up. We-ell... I say blow up, but really, what you did was more like blast it into a fine mist - demolecularization, I'm assuming? And it seems like you used this wooden stick to achieve the effect - it is wood, isn't it? The casing, at least? Willow wood, I'd say, very flexible, very versatile too, but not in the least technological. This is really quite remarkable, you know. Never seen the like, and trust me, I've seen a lot. It's brilliant!"

He was bending his head here and there to get all perspectives on Ron's wand as he spoke, examining it with fascination and casually invading the redhead's personal space, much to his scowling discomfort.

He also appeared completely unfazed by the threatening wands trained on him. It looked more and more as if he was just a muggle - a scientist most likely, and a curious one at that. Hermione grimaced as she came to the realization that they would have to _obliviate _him, if that was the case; she'd never liked that spell.

Quite unexpectedly, the man reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and whipped out something that flashed like metal.

They jolted in automatic reaction, disarming charms springing out of their mouth without much input from the brain - just a knee-jerk instinct; but the man avoided the red beams with effortless grace and, far from being alarmed, merely looked delighted and, if possible, even more intrigued.

The three friends gaped, more and more confused by this strange man and just a little embarrassed at seeing that the thing in his hand wasn't a wand, or even a muggle weapon: just a thin metal tube with a glowing blue diode at one end. Although it was obvious that it could do _something_: it was buzzing as the strange man ran it over their wands as if he was scanning them for information - all the while muttering gibberish to himself, without the slightest care for how rude he was being.

"Truly fascinating. Willow, hah, I was right, and holly... and is that vine wood? Different lengths, different width, and yet they clearly have the same function... or should I say, functions? Obviously they are multi-purpose tools... Weird, though," he frowned in concentration, straightening up with a thoughtful expression: "They don't register as technology at all."

" 'Course not," said Ron bluntly. "They're wands."

"Ron!" hissed Hermione, alarmed. It was apparent that this was just a muggle and, _obliviating _possibilities aside, they couldn't violate the Statute of Secrecy so cavalierly!

But her boyfriend ignored her and scowled at the odd chap: "And for your information, it's rude to touch someone else's wand, so back off!"

The man's deep brown eyes widened in amused amazement: "Wands? What, like magic sticks?" He smiled, pleased and patronizing: "A lot of technology can be mistaken for magical," he said condescendingly. "I think someone said it very well, too. Oh, who was it? Oh, yes! Arthur C. Clarke! Hm, now there's a thought. I should visit. It might be interesting to have a chat with him..."

"Blimey, you talk a lot," muttered Harry, finally deciding that the man, however strange, was not a threat and lowering his wand.

Ron, however, was not convinced and raised his wand even more. He glared: "It's not technology. It's _magic_. And I told you to back off!"

The strange man raised his head to stare at him, meeting his gaze with deep, completely unafraid eyes. For a long moment, he looked steadily into Ron, making him fidget; then suddenly he beamed a lovely yet unnerving smile.

"Brilliant! You, sir, don't look like a loony at all-"

Ron's outraged "Hey!" went ignored.

"-yet you are really, utterly convinced of what you're saying. In this day and age! Oh, this is so very interesting."

The absurd muggle took out a pair of black-rimmed spectacles, which he donned before returning his attention to Ron's wand and babbling on: "It might just be possible that this is a form of partially psychic technology - responding to your belief that it will work by working as you believe it will work. Truly brilliant. Have you ever tried dissecting one of these tool? No, I suppose it never crossed your mind..."

Their jaws fell in incredulity and horror at the casual mention of _dissecting a wand_, but the weird man was spared the explosion that the stormy clouds gathering over Ron's face promised because hurried steps echoed in the narrow alley they were ensconced in.

They all turned to the furthest corner and soon they spotted a pretty, blonde girl in jeans and t-shirt running round it.

"Doctor!" she screamed as she caught sight of them. "They're coming!"

"Doctor?" asked Hermione. "You're a doctor?" Her guess was right then - muggle, _and _a scientist.

"Never mind that," said Harry quickly. "Who, exactly, is coming?"

"Axonoids," came the man's merry reply. "You met one, remember? Blew it up earlier?"

"What?" yelped Rose, surprised.

"With wood sticks!" told her the Doctor in a delighted tone, making her jaw drop. Then he turned to the three, as if in afterthought: "This is Rose, by the way, Rose Tyler."

"Hi!" The girl waved a little, smiling brightly at their stunned expressions.

"And I'm the Doctor. Who are you?"

"Hermione Granger," the witch answered automatically, instilled manners kicking in even in this rather absurd situation. "This is Ron Weasley, and that's Harry Potter. Wait, doctor who?"

For a moment, the strange man faltered, as if hit by an unexpected memory, and looked at them with such an intense and focused stare that they felt x-rayed; but there was a good degree of disorientation in his eyes as well. However, he quickly shook himself out of it and returned to grinning widely: "Just the Doctor. Nice to meet you Hermione, Ron, Harry," he nodded at each of them.

He frowned once more, eyes distant, like he was trying to puzzle something out; but a warning shout from Rose made him spin around just as three more of the golden humanoids in the blotched white skin suits rounded the corner, much more slowly than Rose had, but also much more threateningly. The skin of their faces was metallic gold, with etchings of curly hair and sightless gold eyes that reminded Hermione of shop window dummies.

With one hand, the Doctor whipped off his glasses and stuffed them into a pocket, while with the other, he fiddled with his strange tube-like device for a moment, before he turned, standing straight and protective before them, one hand outstretched as if he was holding a wand instead of... whatever the glowing metal stick was, that he was pointing to the advancing humanoids.

Utterly confused, Harry muttered to his best friends: "What do you think that is, anyway?"

It was the newly arrived girl, Rose, who whispered back knowledgeably: "Sonic screwdriver."

The three friends slanted her incredulous looks, but almost at once returned their attention to the mad muggle in the long coat, who was counting down: "Three... two... one!"

There wasn't any overly-scenic effect, but the three creatures advancing on them abruptly stopped, keened, and collapsed into a confusing mass of tentacles, which wriggled feebly for a moment before stilling. A stink Harry usually associated with eviscerating flobberworms during detention, and Hermione with her parents' septic tank, rose from the vaguely disgusting remains.

"Urgh. Gross," was Rose's succinct comment.

They all took a couple steps closer, intrigued against their better judgment.

Hermione was slack-jawed with shock; Harry nudged the closest tentacle with a foot, peering interestedly at it.

"What spell did you use?" asked Ron, grudgingly curious.

The Doctor looked at him in amusement: "Spell? Seriously?" He shook his head condescendingly: "Simple science, I'm afraid. Broadcasting a signal intrusion to cut them off from the Axos - which essentially kills them. Kind of like a limb being cut off from its body. Nothing magical at all!"

Harry nudged a tentacle again, squishing it slightly; Hermione hissed at him primly: "Stop it already!" and then started scrutinizing the surprising muggle scientist. There was something _really_ odd about him.

The Doctor, for his part, had put his sonic screwdriver away and was once more examining the three of them, a faraway look on his face. He didn't look preoccupied, or perplexed; merely puzzled.

"Doctor? What's wrong?" asked Rose, worried.

The man, however, ignored her and said absently: "You know, you three really look familiar. I don't... for some reason I just can't place you - and that is very, very strange let me tell you, because I have a fantastic memory - but I just don't remember you - except that I do. Maybe. Possibly. Like a déjà-vu..."

He was frowning fiercely, evidently trying to work out the problem.

"Uhm... Doctor?" tried Rose, carefully. "Not to be offensive, but you're 900 years old. You can't possibly remember everything. Maybe you met them a few centuries ago and..."

"What? 900 years old?! But that's ridiculous!" burst out Ron, who hadn't stopped glaring suspiciously at the weird muggle in the long coat. "No one lives more than 150, 160 years at most!"

Talking over him, the Doctor protested indignantly: "I have a fantastic memory, Rose, I would most certainly remember them if I'd ever met them!"

The blonde girl however had turned wide eyes on Ron: "160 years? ...Wait, are you even human? 'Cause I'm pretty sure my species only lives, like, 80 years or so, on average..."

"What do you mean, are we human?! Do we look like, what, mermaids to you?" cried Ron, face reddening in anger.

"Ron, she didn't mean it like that. Muggles don't live as long as wizards, that's all," lectured Hermione tiredly, "and Rose, of course we're human, but having magic makes us longer-lived."

"Again with the magic," muttered the Doctor, rolling his eyes.

"Magic?!" Rose's warm brown eyes went so big they looked on the brink of popping out. "Like, real magic?"

"Yup!" quipped Harry, who'd lost interest in the smelly tentacles at last. "Took me a while to believe, too," he confided with a smile.

"Wait, wait, wait... Speccy git with unruly hair, tall ginger-head, bushy-haired know-it-all!" the Doctor pointed dramatically to each of them in turn. "And magic! Now why does this sound familiar? Why!" He clasped his hands behind his back and paced.

The three friends exchanged uneasy glances. Had this muggle stumbled upon a wizarding magazine, perchance?

The war had been over for less than two years and all three of them had had ample opportunity to clash with the consequences of the celebrity status that hounded them since the Battle of Hogwarts. Even Ron had grown tired of the fame, and the side dish of endless and pointless gossip that followed them everywhere these days.

Harry in particular felt morose – the man dressed and talked like a muggle, he couldn't possibly know them, could he? There was simply no way a muggle would have heard of the Boy-Who-Lived nonsense. Right? Right?

Deciding to try and distract the strange man before he could figure out that he'd read about them in some gossip rag or something, he cut into his path: "Alright, look," he said forcefully. "I don't know who you are or where you're from and I don't know why you think you know us and I don't particularly care about any of that. But you know what those things are, right? The white-and-gold-and-tentacled ones? So how about you tell us?"

"I did tell you!" protested the Doctor indignantly. "They're axonoids. They're part of Axos!"

"What on Earth are axos?" wondered Hermione, a little miffed that she'd never come across the term in all her studies.

"No, no, it's singular. _An_ Axos. No, rather, _the_ Axos. It's a composite creature."

"And what does that mean?" asked Harry, with what he felt was remarkable patience.

The Doctor straightened and adopted the universal tone of teachers in lecture mode: "Axos it at once a biological creature and a spaceship, while axonoids are extensions of it, somewhat independent, but telepathically linked in such a way that Axos can control them, and each element can feel what the others do."

The three friends gaped at him.

The Doctor ignored their reaction and merely went on: "The Axos is a scavenger entity. It has already come to Earth, I remember it quite clearly. And it wasn't here. We-ell... it was _here_, actually, but not _now_. Though it wasn't all that far either. For some reason or other, it seems to like 20th century London. I wonder why?"

Rose grinned cheekily: "You seem to like this time period too, though. Maybe it's a timeframe that has some sort of... great... cosmic... significance..." she waved her hands expressively.

The Doctor mock-glared at her: "Or," he drawled, "it could just be an amazing coincidence."

"Hold on!" exclaimed Ron, with the slightest trace of panic in his voice: "What do you mean, came _to _Earth? Where would it come _from?"_

"I think he's saying that these creatures are aliens," said Hermione faintly.

"One creature," précised the Doctor. "And you are quite correct-"

"What? Like in _Mad Muggle Martin_? Hermione, that's just a comics! It's not real! It's just the kind of lies muggles tell themselves to justify what happens when the Department for Experimental Charms loses control!"

"You keep using the word 'muggle', what is it supposed to mean anyway?" wondered the Doctor.

"I'm not saying they're truly aliens, Ron, just that that's what this doctor is saying..." replied Hermione, utterly ignoring the man in the pinstriped suit, much to his indignation.

Ron, of course, turned to her immediately with a heated retort; Harry, rather more practical and in many ways, more open minded than his dearest friends, moved on to his usual practice of tuning their exchange out: "Why is it here? What does it want?" he asked the strange man, who brightened instantly at being paid attention to.

Hermione and Ron – as was often their wont – stopped their bickering in favour of protesting against his believing 'this nutter'.

The Doctor, evidently choosing to take his cue from Harry, tuned them out too and focused only on the green-eyed young man. He threw his hands into his trousers pockets and balanced on the back of his feet: "Last time axonoids were here... Supposedly, they came for fuel. Axos' real motivations were to drain all energy from Earth, with an ultimate plan to gain the secret of time travel, allowing it to feast anywhere in space and time."

"Why is it always a conquer-the-universe kind of scenario with you?" grumbled Rose, though her excited half-smile belied her words.

Harry eyed her warily: "Always?"

The widening of her grin was the opposite of reassuring.

Hermione's arms crossed before her chest in a tense manner that Harry and Ron had learned to be wary of: "Are you trying to get us to believe," she said very, very calmly, "that these things are alien from a galaxy far away, and they're on Earth for a pit-stop?" Her voice raised progressively until it was positively shrilling.

"No, no, no!" exclaimed the Doctor, eyes wide and full of innocence. "Not a different galaxy at all. The Axos worlds were simply on the edge of the Mutter's Spiral - what you lot call the Milky Way."

Three deadpan glares centred on him.

"It's the same galaxy!" protested the Doctor earnestly.

Rose chuckled.

"If it has worlds of its own, why does it want Earth?" asked Harry, though in a resigned tone.

Because, really. He might only have heard the movies from his cupboard at the Dursleys', but he did know the drill: aliens always wanted to invade Earth. If you believed in aliens, that is. Which… all things considered… wasn't any more of a stretch than believing in magic, and in Dark Lords always wanting to conquer the world.

Ron, however, had grown up with very different expectations from reality. "Harry!" he shouted, aghast. "You can't possibly believe this nutter! Look, just come with me to the Ministry, we'll report our sightings, it's obviously something confiscated that escaped, I bet they're already on the problem."

"Well, by this point in time, those worlds were crippled by extreme solar flare activity and subsequent entropic effects, being drained of all life and energy," the Doctor answered Harry, as if Ron's outburst hadn't happened. "Awful destiny, albeit quite common for solar systems the universe over. Still, like any sufficiently advanced civilization, the people living there came up with a plan for survival beyond their worlds' end. Namely, Axos."

Ron muttered something along the lines of "Ridiculous!" but was ignored. Hermione, for her part, was looking at the Doctor in fascination.

It was Rose who asked, with her usual curiosity: "What do you mean?"

He grinned back at her fondly and explained: "Axos was a creature grown specifically for the escape journey. The last remnant of their culture! It was designed to be a scavenger, sucking energy from planets to continue its voyage. Last time it came to Earth - oh, what was it? The Seventies? The Eighties? Doesn't matter. It tried to start a 'feeding cycle'. Axonoids met with UNIT and promised them axonite to enlarge food and end world hunger." He shook his head in mock-disappointment: "UNIT, of course, jumped on the chance and ordered worldwide distribution."

"Unit?" interrupted Harry in confusion.

"Unified Intelligence Taskforce," clarified the Doctor.

"Oh, ok," commented Harry doubtfully. He'd never heard of it. Then again, it's not like he had a clear idea of what branches there were in his governments - either the magical or the muggle one.

Hermione was a little more confident in her own knowledge, however: "Hold on, I never heard a word about this. There isn't such a thing as this UNIT you talk of. And, an attempt at solving the world hunger problem?... Shouldn't I have studied such a thing in school? What is axonite anyway?" she demanded suspiciously.

"Government cover-ups are a lot more frequent than you probably suspect," said the Doctor diplomatically.

"Yeah, we have some idea of it..." muttered Harry, thinking of Welsh Dragons flying over London.

Hermione shook her head despairingly: "But this makes no sense," she muttered.

"The point isn't how easily humans can be kept in the dark;" said the Doctor, waving a hand impatiently. "The point is, I know what Axos is capable of, because I was here when it came before. In fact, I was the one who realised it planned to drain the planet of all its energy and stopped it," he added smugly.

"You?!" exclaimed Ron, incredulous and derisive.

Harry raised his eyebrows: "How?"

The Doctor brightened: "Oh, it was very clever. The axonoids took power from a nuclear power plant and later-"

"No, I meant, how did you stop them?" précised Harry, a little impatiently. A plan of action sounded good now - better than a history lesson, to be sure!

"We-elll... it involved a rather dangerous bluff and quite a few clever moves on my part, if I say so myself, but basically, I placed the Axos in a time loop, which should have kept it confined until it decayed naturally, sometime six billion years in the future. Theoretically. Unfortunately, it's like every time I put someone into a time loop, someone else decides to get them out!" the Doctor grumbled.

"What? Who would be so stupid?" blurted out Harry, even as an increasingly agitated Hermione started questioning what on Earth did he mean by a 'time loop'.

"British explorers, as a matter of fact," replied the Doctor despondently. "Mid 21st-century, there was a global energy crisis on Earth, economy crash, political unrest, fanatics predicting the end of civilization, the usual. Britain authorized the attempt at piercing the temporal containment because they hoped to use Axos' power for a new age of energy for the planet." He snorted. "Of course, it went all wrong: Axos turned their transmitter into a receiver and began feeding on the Space Defence Station in Devesham-"

"Hold on. Stop," interjected Hermione. "When you say 'time loop'…" She trailed off, then changed course: "No, wait. Wait a minute. Mid-21st century?" She glared at him in naked disbelief: "Doctor, we're in the late 20th century now!" she protested in a rather exasperated tone.

"I know that," the Doctor said, looking baffled. "Your point?"

Hermione's mouth opened and closed uselessly.

"Were you involved again?" asked Rose interestedly.

"How can he possibly have been involved in something that hasn't happened yet?" asked Hermione shrilly.

"Time travel," answered the Doctor smugly. "And yes, Rose, I was. After all, the Tardis makes for an extremely juicy bait... o-oh, that sounded so wrong." He pulled a face. "Anyway! Things happened, but eventually, I managed to make creative use of the fast return switch at just the right time to send Axos back into the time loop and trap it again, this time for good! Had to use nuclear missiles to ensure it, though. Urgh. That was a rather awful adventure, all in all."

He beamed brightly and Rose smiled as well.

That was about the point when Hermione lost composure: "Stop blabbing on such nonsense!" she shrieked. "Time travel indeed! You don't - you _can't _travel in time, you don't even believe in magic - and there's no muggle technology for it! And _years _into the _future_? Ha! You can't go to the future - I should know, I've used a time-turner for an entire year!"

Ron grabbed her in a hug to soothe her: "Hey, it's ok. Of course he isn't making sense. Honestly, love. Can't you tell he's a complete nutter?"

"Oi!" started the Doctor, indignantly, then changed track abruptly: "Wait. Wait, wait: you time-travelled? On a regular basis? You aren't supposed to have time travelling technology this soon in Earth's timeline!"

"There's no technology for it!" yelled Hermione back. "It's magic! And it's restricted! The Ministry of Magic has passed literally hundreds of laws restricting Time-Turners, Professor McGonagall had to write all sorts of letters so I could have one, tell them that I was a model student, and that I'd never, ever use it for anything except attending several classes at once..."

"Attending classes. _Attending classes?!_ You meddled with time just to go to class?!" The Doctor stared at her as if he'd never happened upon anything so ridiculously horrifying in his life. "Of all the irresponsible...!"

"I wasn't irresponsible!" shrieked Hermione.

Harry coughed, remembering the night they helped Sirius, but it went ignored as the Doctor thundered: "The _damage _you risked...!"

Ron scowled at him, releasing Hermione and stepping threateningly towards him: "Stop shouting! Don't you see you're upsetting her? Calm down, alright!"

"Calm down!" the Doctor yelped, and pointed an accusatory finger at the redhead. "Don't you tell me to _calm down_. Do you even have an idea of how disastrous it would be to face a full-blown paradox? Do you? Huh?" He ran a hand through his hair and Rose knew him enough to notice he was actually nervous. "Bloody humans! Always throwing yourself into things without thinking. Do you even…? Argh! Hopping about timelines without knowing what you do, you could end up altering someone's life path in such a drastic fashion that it would create temporal anomalies such as- such as un-births!" He cried. "How would you like to have never been born? Huh? Huh? Any breach in the laws of time can result in catastrophic events!"

"That's why it's not commonly available - the most stringent laws and penalties are in place to prevent the misuse of Time-Turners!" retorted Hermione furiously, her voice a crescendo: "Everybody knows that time-related magic is unstable. And that is not the point because you are a muggle and muggles do not have the means to travel in time and even if they did they couldn't go to the future because no-one can! There is no form of time-manipulating magic that can take you _forward_ in time. You can only go to the past! And not even that much!"

By this point Hermione and the Doctor were shouting over each other and Ron was, rather ineffectually, shouting at both of them.

A little to the side, Harry and Rose exchanged glances that were a little helpless and a little amused.

_Any idea?_ mouthed Harry jerking his head towards the three bickerers.

Rose bit her lower lip in thought, then shot Harry a mischievous grin: she put two fingers to her mouth and whistled sharply.

Silence fell.

"If you three don't stop this nonsense and behave, I'll put you in the corner!" she told them severely, hands on her hips and body slightly bent forward, exactly like her mother used to scold her when she was a kid. "I mean it. I am very, very cross!"

The three of them gaped at her like fish, with identical expression of childish befuddlement, and she bit the inside of her mouth to stop herself from laughing.

Harry didn't bother to censor himself and collapsed against the nearest wall, guffawing.

The Doctor glanced from him to Rose sheepishly, a hand rubbing the back of his head.

"But he's not making any sense," wailed Hermione plaintively, though without the forcefulness of earlier. "You can't travel to the future, you just can't!"

Rose regarded her in surprise and the Doctor scoffed, but it was Harry who replied, in his most reasonable tone: "You know, Hermione, you haven't considered the possibility that they might be _from _the future. Then this would be their past and therefore they could come here. Err, now. Err..." said Harry, starting off confidently and getting himself a little confused along the way.

"That's not how it work, because time is not linear. But hey! Good thinking. Very logical," praised the Doctor.

Harry perked up. Hermione shot him a betrayed look.

"Anyway, Rose is right… no point overreacting – I'll just… I'll check things over later, make sure you didn't do any serious damage… and dispose of whatever technology you stumbled upon…"

"I didn't do any damage! And who are you to judge that, anyway?" fumed Hermione.

"No need for that, we dest…err, that is, the Time-Turners were all destroyed… during the war, yeah," nodded Harry earnestly.

"Oh?" The Doctor raised his eyebrows, his unease growing more obvious, but Rose didn't give him time to ask for more: "Doctor? She sort of has a point, though. Not for us," she added hastily, when he scowled at her, "but, well, does the Axos travel in time too? Because if it doesn't, whatever happened in the mid-21st century hasn't happened yet. Right?"

The Doctor pondered for a moment: "Rose Tyler, you might just be onto something there."

Abandoning the argument entirely, he paced the width of the alley, letting his coat billow about him every time he turned sharply back and forth. "As far as I know, it can only do basic time travel, nothing impressive - at the most, move a few seconds backwards and forwards in time."

"What's the good in that?" asked Rose baffled.

"Oh, I don't know... escape being struck by missiles by jumping forward in time for the seconds it would take the missiles to reach and pass through its current location, for instance." He grinned briefly. "Things like that."

"Useful," commented Harry with equanimity.

"Which means!" cried the Doctor twirling around dramatically. "That the whole getting stuck in the moment of its own destruction hasn't happened yet, from the Axos' point of view. Just like you said." He grinned at Rose.

She grinned back: "So, this is what? One of the many attempts at taking over Earth?" She grimaced. "And how sad is it, that such a sentence sounds normal to me?"

The Doctor ignored that: "Possibly. Probably. Hm, I wonder how many times I'll have to stop it, yet. There was that time Mary Shelley and I met some axonoids too..."

"Mary Shelley?!" asked Rose with a huge grin. "Frankenstein's Mary Shelley?"

"Long story," the Doctor waved her off.

"You," said Hermione very precisely, "are not making any sense." She was glaring at him with all her not inconsiderable might. "Non-linear time!" She threw her hands up, completely fed-up. "Going to the future! Hah!" she scoffed. "Magic can only bring you _back _in time and the longest period that can be travelled without serious chance of harm to the traveller or time itself is around five hours!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes: "The ridiculous theories about time people come up with will never cease to amuse me. Really. This one's almost as good as the Linawers' - no, wait, no-one's come up with anything as funny as the Linawers' theory. They think you can only move _sideways _in time - sliding through holes in the time vortex." He sounded almost gloating. "Oh, and the Doraners of Soigol IV! They think you can travel in time by racing around inside a toroidal hole enveloped within a sphere of normal matter that, theoretically, warps the space-time around it - kind of like a cosmic doughnut."

He gave Rose a silly grin: "Imagine running along the hole of a yeast-raised doughnut... oh, you would probably slip on all that glaze. And the weirdly coloured fancy toppings! I like the fancy toppings. You know," he looked thoughtfully in the distance, "I don't think I've tried doughnuts in this body yet - we really should drop by some Dutch settlers in 19th century North America, Rose. What do you say? Although we might not recognize what we find - they were called oliekoek back then and were all sorts of shapes. It was Hanson Gregory who invented the ring-shaped doughnut. 1847 – he was only 16 years old! Now, that's creativity for you. I remember his mother, lovely woman. Met her while he was off at sea aboard a lime-trading ship and she taught me the technique along with her recipe. The secret," he confided to the bemused blonde, "is to punch the hole in the centre of dough with a tin pepper box. Or, no, wait!" he cried suddenly. "I have a better idea! Let's go to Cofeeny Town on Dunkin III, Rose. They have the best Doughnuts Duelling Competition in the whole galaxy – all sorts of frosted, glazed, powdered, sweetened and filled fried dough confectionery! And I do mean _all_ sorts - ooh! I wonder if they make it with banana filling?"

Suddenly realizing he was rambling down a very long-winded tangent, and also that he'd digressed rather a lot from the original topics of discussion, the Doctor shut his mouth and glanced at his current companions, abashed.

The three newly-met humans were staring at him in various degrees of disbelief or amusement (a set of reactions the Doctor was growing ever more familiar with in this incarnation). Thankfully, Rose was grinning fondly at him, eyes sparkling as usual. That rather cheered him up.

"You are completely mad," said Hermione flatly.

"Well, where do you get off criticizing me?" protested the Doctor, pouting like a child. "At least I'm not blabbing away about magic!"

"What's wrong with magic?" asked Ron angrily, offended.

The Doctor rolled his eyes: "There is no such thing as magic."

Hermione snorted, looking down on the Doctor: "I realize it's hard to accept for a scientist, but magic does exist," she said condescendingly.

"Please!" exclaimed the Doctor disparagingly. "It's just an everyday name for science. Like voodoo dolls – honestly! Manipulating a puppet to affect a living body? _You_ might call that magic. _I_'d call it a DNA replication module."

Hermione's eyes narrowed: "And how do you call _this_?"

She waved her wand quickly and a pile of garbage nearby got itself up and coalesced into a transfigured pig.

The Doctor's sonic screwdriver was out and whirring even before Rose's startled exclamations had rung out.

"Interesting," he muttered, getting his glasses out one-handed and peering through them at the pig.

The animal oinked.

"Well?" asked Hermione smugly. "What do you say to that?"

"We-ell... it could be a Wexelian extrapolator... except they're more for synthesizing raw materials than anything… or perhaps a Shiranoi printer, but no, that's too small - I always thought it was a waste that their technology tended to take up whole rooms, they might have done well with some microchips..."

"Are you serious?" asked Hermione in befuddled disbelief. "You'd rather think it's alien then accept it's magic?"

"There's no such thing as magic," said the Doctor, still focused on the pig, now preoccupied with rooting around. "There are, however, a number of technologies able to achieve the mutation of basic molecular structure and all of them would be utterly alien to this planet at this point in time, though to be fair, none of them should be able to transform non-living into living matter..."

"Hah!"

"Then again," he went on, straightening up, "Block Transfer Computations could create or re-create any object or spacetime event, provided enough mathematical information was supplied... and guess what? Axos, being by nature morphologically unstable living organic matter, is perfectly capable of performing Block Transfer Computations and surviving the stress. And of course, last time there were axonoids all around, some of the axonite was kept - You know, there's a thought. You might be somehow manipulating axonite!" he exclaimed, looking pleased with himself.

"He really does talk a lot," murmured Ron to Rose, as an aside.

"Don't I know it," she smiled back.

"What, pray tell, is axonite?" grumbled Hermione with narrowed eyes.

The Doctor beamed excitedly: "It's a _thinking _molecule. The chameleon of the elements! It's pretty amazing, it can use the energy it absorbs to copy, recreate or restructure any given substance. It can enlarge or shrink organisms, absorb, convert, transmit and program all forms of energy. As long as the energy exists, it can do pretty much anything with it."

He swirled to a stop and was suddenly, unnervingly serious: "That's why we must starve it."

"You've stopped making sense again," deadpanned Hermione.

"No, no, no, listen: Axos has nutrition and energy cycles. They need to be replenished, and if they're not, it'll die. Hopefully for good, though considering that it is grown from a single cell, that's doubtful. I mean, just a single cell surviving would mean a chance to grow again, and then we'd be back to square one. Again. But that's ok. It'll work in the here and now! We can worry about other times some other time." He grinned delightedly: "Oh, that was a good turn of phrase."

"It was really not," retorted a very stressed Hermione. "And I've never heard of axonite before, but I'm rather sure it's got nothing to do with our abilities, alright? We're wizards. Well, they're wizards, I'm a witch. We have the ability to use magic. We're born like that. And I know it's hard for a scientist to accept, I really do, but it's true. It's all true. And it has nothing to do with this Axos creature of yours!"

"Technically, it's not mine..." the Doctor trailed off under her glare and smiled a little uncomfortably.

Before they had a chance to continue their discussion, Harry, who, half out of habit, half out of instinct, had wandered to the end of the alley to check out things, shouted a warning: "There's more of those axo-things!"

Sure enough, another couple of the golden, white-clad creatures were advancing on them.

A moment later, a low buzz and the smell of ozone warned them of the abrupt arrival of three more at their backs.

"They can apparate?" yelled Ron in shock.

"If by that you mean 'they can use a common transmat to materialize here'... then yes."

The Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to collapse the three at their back but as soon as they went down, four more appeared to take their place.

"Oops!" commented the Doctor lightly. "Looks like the Axos has a grip on our position. We shouldn't have stayed in one place so long."

Wasting no more time, Harry sent a _reducto_ at the mouth of the alley, blowing one of the menacing creature up and scattering the others.

The Doctor grabbed Rose's hand and yelled: "Run!"

And for some reasons, Harry, Ron and Hermione found themselves doing just that, their hurried steps pounding after the weird stranger and the blonde girl, as if it was _sensible_.

Somehow, though, it felt right.

"This way!" shouted the Doctor, far too happily. Rose's hand was securely in his and they moved together with the same fluid grace Harry, Ron and Hermione had built among themselves in years of friendship. In fact, Ron's hand had found Hermione's in a very similar way, barely even noticing.

The three of them smiled at each other as they ran, despite the danger and confusion they were in.

Oh, yes. It felt right.

After a few apparently random turns, they ran into an alley, utterly indistinguishable from all the others in the neighbourhood, except for the fact that this one contained a blue telephone box.

"_Et voilà!" _exclaimed the Doctor, stopping so abruptly that the three friends bumped into each other to avoid careening into him.

Rose passed him by fluidly, letting his hand go to fetch a small key on a silvery chain out of her t-shirt, key which she quickly fitted to the lock of the 'police phone box' - as the writings upon it declared it.

"Welcome to my Tardis!" said the Doctor, looking like a proud parent at his child's first dance exhibition, and he waved them in after Rose, who'd left the door open for them, going in.

Without hesitation, the three of them ran inside... and stopped with a gasp of awe.

The big, circular room gave off the kind of feeling Hogwarts had welcomed them with year after year: of a building who was alive, of a living being which was a world.

Welcoming gold and orange light blended into green and blue shadows, and harmonious coral forks grew out of and into metallic grilles and panelled walls.

It was beautiful, and powerful.

The Doctor strolled in after them, smug as the cat who got the canary. He closed the door gently and threw his coat casually on one of the coral forks as he jumped up to the console eagerly.

"This is lovely," said Harry with genuine admiration, walking up the ramp a little ways.

"Yeah," admitted Ron, a little unwillingly. "It's pretty fantastic. Woah, look at those!" he exclaimed, mouth open in wonder at the golden hexagons that dotted the walls.

The Doctor and Rose seemed to be waiting for something else, but whatever it was, it didn't come: Harry and Ron just wandered lazily around the console room, admiring the faintly pulsing rotor and the huge coral trunks all around, and for an awkward moment the conversation stalled, as the two very strange muggles just looked at them, a little baffled.

"What?" Ron asked finally, perplexed.

The Doctor was startled out of his bewilderment and smiled brightly: "Nothing!" He turned quickly to the haphazard collection of buttons and levers that littered the central console and busied himself with something.

"It's just that usually people comment on..." Rose gestured around her meaningfully.

"What?" asked Harry, just as confused.

Rose and the Doctor exchanged a glance.

"Um. The fact that... the inside's bigger than the outside?" she tried.

"What's strange with that?" asked Ron obliviously.

The Doctor's eyes widened, as he yet again stared intensely at Ron, as if studying him against some sort of blueprint in his mind, then he pretended to shrug it off: "Nothing! Nothing at all! _Allons-y!"_

He pulled a lever forcefully and a wheezing, groaning noise started up while he bent on the console, pushing a few more buttons.

"You're not muggles. You're aliens," came Hermione's voice, which sounded at once vindicated and critical. With a start, Harry and Ron realized that she hadn't budged from the entrance. "This… this is all alien."

The Doctor raised his head and stared at her: "Yes," he said simply.

Rose frowned worriedly at the brown-haired girl.

"What?" yelped Harry, making his way back to his best friend. "What makes you say that? He looks human."

"What do you mean 'alien'?" asked Ron at the same time.

"_You _look Time Lord-ish," muttered the Doctor sullenly.

"It's bigger on the inside," pointed out Hermione.

"Exactly!" beamed Rose, though not as brightly as usual; while the Doctor straightened and pointed at Hermione with a triumphant "Ah-ha!"

"What do you mean 'alien'?" repeated Ron, more forcefully. "And what's wrong with things being bigger on the inside?"

"Muggles can't do that, Ron!" exclaimed Hermione exasperatedly, even as the Doctor strolled up to Ron, explaining: "It means that I'm... pretty foreign, let's say. I spend my time travelling through the stars."

"You... travel in space," repeated Harry, eyeing the Doctor with a mix of incredulity and envy.

"And time!" agreed the Doctor enthusiastically.

"That's generally considered strange," said Rose in a helpful tone, regarding Ron carefully.

"Doesn't seem any stranger than Centaurs," the red-head commented with a shrug. "They're pretty hung-up on stars too."

"Centaurs!" The Doctor's eyes lit up with enthusiastic wonder and he smiled more widely still: "Real, actual, Centaurs? Where?"

Rose rolled her eyes good-naturedly: "Not now, Doctor! Axonoid invasion, remember?"

"Right!" He seemed to shake himself out and returned his attention to piloting.

"But Ron!" cried Hermione, exasperated. "They're muggles!"

"Very cool muggles," commented Harry, earning himself a beaming smile from the Doctor.

The red-head's eyes widened. "Wait, you mean this isn't magic?" he asked wonderingly. "Blimey!"

"There's no such thing as magic," said the Doctor absently. Ignoring Hermione's tired: "Yes, there is!" he went on: "This is my ship. It's called the Tardis. T-A-R-D-I-S. That's 'Time and Relative Dimension in Space'."

This gave Hermione's pause. "You mean... you really can travel between any point in space and time? Without magic… without limits… and without restrictions?"

"Exactly!" the Doctor beamed. "Well, mostly without restrictions," he added as an afterthought.

"How?" exhaled Hermione.

"What?"

"How do you travel in time? This isn't magic - so what makes it go?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Try me!"

"Alright, well. A grown Tardis is a dimensionally transcendent being capable of existing in, as well as moving backwards and forward along, what, in the reduced dimensional awareness of your race, would be perceived as several time-space loops spliced together. And if you wish to be told how I can pilot her, you shall have to learn my language, which is impossible I might add, because English simply doesn't have enough words to express the necessary concepts."

The brown-haired witch was gaping at him with a lost expression in her eyes.

"Just nod when he stops for breath, it's easier," told him Rose kindly.

Ron smiled at her: "Exactly what I do with Hermione."

Said girl huffed in irritation.

"Look," said the Doctor a little more kindly. "You don't _really_ want to know. Seriously, way to take the fun and the mystery out of everything!"

"Well, I for one think it's brilliant!" said Harry decisively.

He was on the other side of the rotor from the Doctor and was brushing his fingers delicately against the cool glass of the column.

"She," corrected the Doctor with a small smile. "Seems like she's taken a shine to you. She'll only let people touch her if she likes them."

Harry's smile widened: "She. Alright." He stroked the glass a little more. "She feels amused," he commented with a small chuckle.

Hermione cautiously drew near and put her hand next to Harry's, but all she felt was the cold glass, and a very faint, vague disapproval. She drew in a shuddering breath that sounded almost like a sob.

The Doctor told her kindly: "That's okay, culture shock. Happens to the best of us."

Rose slanted him a glare, but he didn't notice because Hermione was straightening herself to her full height and piercing him with a furious glare.

"I," she enunciated very clearly, "have been informed at age eleven that the world I lived in was markedly bigger and more complex than I'd always believed and that I was, in a very definite way, _different_ from anyone I'd ever met, including my own parents, and not only did I accept this, found my role in it all and learned how to fit in, but I was _brilliant _at it!"

"That she was," nodded Harry fervently.

"Amazing, totally amazing," beamed Ron, oddly proud.

"I do _not _get culture shock!" she finished shrilly.

"Oh. Well. Good for you," commented the Doctor, baffled once more.

Rose fought down a smirk and clapped her hands briskly to regain everybody's focus: "Right, well, anyway. Axos," she said pointedly. "Earth in need of saving - rings any bell?"

"Right!" exclaimed the Doctor. "Well, come on then. Let's have a look."

"A look at what?" asked Rose, arching an eyebrow with a challenging, expectant grin.

"I want to see if we can manage to neutralize the spaceship part of Axos. That'd solve our problem neatly."

"How would you even find it?" asked Hermione, a little acidly.

"By looking," replied the Doctor as if it was the most obvious thing ever. "We're currently orbiting high above Earth," he added matter-of-factly, "so it shouldn't be too difficult."

"Oh, that's wonderful! Come have a look, you three!" exclaimed Rose with a friendly smile, and threw the doors open.

This time, the three magic-users' eyes widened in utter, undeniable shock.

Suspended in a vast sea of blackness, Earth gleamed like a blue and green marble streaked with ribbons of white, beautiful like a rare and luminous gem.

Even having seen it time and again, Rose still found the full splendour of this sight an indescribable thrill and her face was alight with joy and wonder as she admired the golden edge of the sun-touched side of her planet.

Hermione was barely holding herself in check in her flabbergasted enthusiasm, gripping the door edge tightly to remind herself that she couldn't just run out and examine her planet closely as she wished.

Harry's eyes were huge with shock and delight and Ron looked simply dumbfounded.

The Doctor smiled fondly. It was always gratifying to see this kind of reaction. Humans were often, in his opinion, among the most interesting sights the universe had to offer.

"Wow," breathed Harry, enthralled. "This surely beats studying Astronomy atop a tower!"

Everybody chuckled at this and turned from the view, albeit reluctantly.

"Right! Here we go," said the Doctor decisively, calling up result after result on his monitor. "The Tardis has some exquisitely sensitive detectors designed to reveal what would otherwise be hidden from our view. Now, if I reverse the polarity of their camouflaging field… I should be able to turn what's invisible into visible and perhaps also enable us to affect the spaceship portion of Axos... yes!"

He grinned proudly.

"I'm brilliant," he informed the four humans – and gestured at the still open doors, outside which a smooth, golden-coloured ship had appeared, drifting lazily through space on more or less their same orbit around the planet.

They admired it for a long moment, while the Doctor kept working on his various devices.

"If we can see it, won't they be able to see us?" wondered Harry aloud.

"Chameleon circuit," replied the Doctor distractedly. "The Tardis takes on the appearance of something that it would be normal to find in the spot she temporarily takes up. They won't notice us."

"I thought the chameleon circuit was broken?" asked Rose with a frown, at the same time as Hermione blurted out: "Than why does it look like a blue telephone box?"

The Doctor snapped: "I happen to like it! Anyway, we're heavily shielded. Stop worrying."

They turned to him and noticed that he was sporting a frown and his eyes were scanning the screen in front of him almost frantically.

"What's wrong?" asked Rose immediately, closing the doors and readying herself for whatever additional trouble the Doctor was apparently finding.

"No UNIT," he muttered absentmindedly. "Not the slightest trace…" His frown deepened into a scowl.

"What do you mean?"

"There isn't a single mention of UNIT to be found in any database on Earth. It's like it never existed. And that… that's impossible."

He kept staring at the screen as if he could force out some answers by will alone. "The only thing that could account for such a huge element of Earth history disappearing would be a major alteration in the past, sufficient to change the futures of all people involved with UNIT at any point rather drastically – including me. But if such a monumental shift in the timelines had occurred, I would have felt it!"

Keeping calm, Rose pointed out: "Could we be in a parallel universe again? Like that time with my not-dad and the Cybermen?"

"No, no, no, that's not possible. A different universe would feel wrong. Remember how ill the Tardis was?" His voice wavered the slightest bit and Rose winced, recalling how they'd thought her dead.

The three magic-users kept quiet, watching with wide eyes and hoping to make sense of things at one point or another, but sensing it wasn't the time for questions.

The Doctor jumped up and started pacing frantically: "No, there _is_ something strange here, but... Hold on. Wait wait wait. No. But maybe… no, no. But I should be able to sense more!..." He wrung a hand through his dishevelled hair. "No UNIT, now that is strange. This whole situation is strange. In fact, I don't think I've ever found myself in a stranger situation - we-ell... I say never... there was that time with the-"

"Doctor, now's not the time for reminiscing!" said Rose, grabbing him by an arm. His attitude was starting to scare her just a bit. The Doctor wasn't supposed to be _confused_.

"Right-o!" He smiled at her reassuringly, but his eyes were dark and worried still. Then his gaze strayed to the screen once more, unhappily: "Still, Rose, this situation is bewildering. I still have all my memories of my time with UNIT. Logically, they haven't been rewritten, which means that UNIT exists. So how come it doesn't?"

"Doctor!" interrupted Rose again, firmly. "Saving the Earth first. Puzzling out the situation can wait!"

He sighed explosively and grabbed her in a hug. "Ok," he murmured, and then a little louder: "Ok."

He released her and went back to his pacing: "I was thinking of using my contacts in UNIT for this, but clearly, that's out of the question, though why it is so, I cannot fathom. The flux of time around us is making no sense... but yeah, yeah. Later. That means, however, that we don't have the resources to fight Axos…"

"Wait, there's no one else who could help?" interjected Hermione incredulously.

The Doctor paid her no mind: "So, no fighting. Which isn't bad, all in all, except… Well, I suppose I could try and trap it in the time loop again, or for the first time, or whatever, but that really was a more risky mess than I'm comfortable with… and anyway it doesn't seem to have done much good. I wonder..."

"Doctor!" cried Hermione, faintly frustrated, but again, she was ignored.

The Doctor frowned at Rose: "I suppose the best way to do about things would be to persuade the Axos to leave."

The blond girl regarded him incredulously: "I know you can talk for England, Doctor, but do you really think it would listen?"

The Doctor grimaced. "If we could somehow trick it into thinking that the Earth isn't worth the effort after all..."

"How? 'Cause I've met very few aliens who weren't interested in marketing my planet, even if just as junk, like the Slitheens," said Rose.

"Slitheryns?" blurted out Ron, making everybody jump, since he'd remained remarkably quiet so far. "The Slytherins are aliens?! I should have bloody well known!"

"Oh, what nonsense, Ron!" exclaimed Hermione, exasperated, while Harry chortled in the background.

"Sli-_theens_, and they don't slither, and actually, Rose! That's a brilliant idea!"

"What?" asked the startled blonde.

"Blowing up the planet! Axos won't be interested in the remains, it's got axonite enough that burnt and torn pieces of Earth would be of no consequence to it."

His triumphant grin was met with an ominous silence.

Finally, Rose asked very carefully: "Have you finally gone round the bend?"

The Doctor blinked, then realized what she'd probably misunderstood, and waved his arms frantically in the air, trying to convey his enthusiasm: "No, no, no, not for real! If we can trick the Axos' sensors into registering the Earth as gone... they'll move on to somewhere else!"

"Like a cloaking device." Rose drew a relieved breath as she got it.

"Exactly!"

The Doctor beamed maniacally, but she wasn't sold: "And what about somewhere else?" she asked disapprovingly.

"We-eell..." A hand snaked up to run through his hair again, as his smile dimmed, then brightened again: "I can manipulate the ship interface and rig the controls so that the course heading will be somewhere in the constellation of Fornax. There's nothing there, just a barred-spiral nebula where life won't develop for another four billions years, give or take; it shouldn't be able to do much damage there, at least for a while."

And finally, Rose smiled as well: "Alright. Sounds like a plan. But how are we to trick it?"

"I can't think of any charm that could obtain such an effect," piped up Hermione, abruptly reminding the two of her presence.

"What if we combine more than one spell?" asked Harry unexpectedly. When everybody turned to him, he elaborated. "Well, the Disillusionment Charm could hide the real Earth... and then we could project something over it, with a different spell I mean, and the end result would be more or less the same as what you want."

The Doctor started slowly smiling and straightened up, watching them with interest.

"Hmm..." murmured Hermione. "That... should be doable. Bit tricky, but..."

"Disillusionment Charm?" asked Rose curiously, with a quick side glance at the unexpectedly silent Doctor.

"Yeah, it's a spell that can conceal whatever you cast it on. It's not that it makes you invisible, it just... makes you the exact colour and texture of whatever's behind you. Like a chameleon. The animal, not that circuit thingy of yours," Harry précised a little nervously.

"Brilliant!" was the Doctor's only comment.

"But how can we conceal an entire planet?" asked Ron. "That's... I mean, that's... that's... big," he finished weakly.

"Huge. Great. Colossal. Massive," nodded Rose, who'd clearly spent too much time with her Doctor in pinstripes.

"Astronomical," snickered Harry.

"Ooh... I like you!" beamed the Doctor, who always appreciated a good thesaurus as much as a bad pun.

"Actually, I think that's doable," intervened Hermione thoughtfully. "The Disillusionment Charm has an area of effect, rather than being tied to a specific magical core: that's why it can be cast on non-magical things or people too, with _exactly_ the same effect. Extending this type of charm to a more voluminous target is certainly possible... just think of what they did to the stadium for the Quidditch World Cup! I know I studied the theory in Arithmancy... tweaking an existing spell just for size adjustment should be only a matter of ensuring that the numbers of the additional spellwords and of the original and end effect match magically." She frowned: "Of course, the bigger the area to affect the more power is required... We might have to call some people for help, but..."

"Oh, we've got power, never you worry," said the Doctor with cheerful confidence.

He was looking at them with a sort of amused delight, like an indulgent parent watching his children doing something clever. He had crossed his arms and legs, leaning back against the console, and seemed content to watch them happily and let them work it all out.

Hermione sighed: "Too bad we don't have the time for it. It'd be an amazing project."

"Oh?" The Doctor's eyebrows went up; he still looked rather amused.

Rose snickered: "Time Lord, him." She gave them an impish smile, tongue poking out of her teeth charmingly. "I think he can find you some _time_."

The Doctor chuckled; Hermione however shook her head: "But the calculations alone!... I don't think I can work out all the necessary equations in less than a few weeks, I'd have to review what I've already learned and study more... And even if we get an Artithmancy Master to help, considering the scale of the project and the number of variables and the unbelievable risk if anything goes wrong... It'll take months for sure!"

"Nonsense!" replied the Doctor cheerfully. "I'm very, very good with numbers. Just start on those equations and I'll get around to help you in a minute. You'll see, we'll have them sorted in no time."

Hermione gaped at him while he turned to Harry: "What..." - he grimaced - "what _spell_, if you really want to call it that, did you have in mind for the illusionary projection?"

Harry blinked, surprised at being asked: "Err... well, usually it's Hermione who knows her spells best..." His green eyes darted to her friend and back rapidly. "But... I guess, something like a Pensieve memory?"

At the blank but inquisitive looks he received, he explained: "If you put memories into a Pensieve you can review them, sort them, stuff like that... and they can be viewed by someone else that wasn't there at the time, too."

"Fascinating," murmured the Doctor, who, indeed, looked definitely intrigued.

"Yeah, anyway… To put the memories in, you have to extract them first and I thought, maybe... maybe we could do that, and then instead of putting them in a Pensieve, which we don't have, we could... I don't know, send them." He waved his hand haphazardly. "To the spaceship, yeah?"

"Even disregarding the fact that you can't _send _memories, what memory do you think we could send?" snapped Hermione. "I don't know you, but _I've_ never seen the Earth blow up!"

"I have," blurted out Rose, surprising everybody (except, of course, the Doctor). "I mean, I was there. Will be there. Err... five billions years in the future - the year 5.5/Apple/26. I saw the Earth go up in flames." And she launched in a halting description of the experience.

When the three magic-users managed to metaphorically collect their jaws from the floor, Harry raised his wand hesitantly: "So, are you alright with this? It doesn't hurt or anything," he hurriedly added. "It's just... strange."

Rose grinned: "I can do strange."

Harry smiled back. Feeling rather proud of himself - learning those spells hadn't been easy - he held his wand up to her temple and coached her gently on releasing the memory.

It was something he'd made a point to research after the War, conscious of how incredibly important Snape's last gesture had been - and on so many levels too; for the War, for him personally... And here was proof that he'd been right - memories saving the world once more.

The Doctor had his geeky glasses on again and was watching closely as the faintly luminescent strand of pearly white memory flew from Rose's head to the tip of Harry's wand and then, dethatching itself from the source, flailed in the air for a moment before being caught by the glass vial Hermione had thoughtfully produced.

"Never in all my lives..." he muttered under his breath, all his focus on the perlaceous, swirling fluid. "Amazing, simply amazing."

He rounded on Rose, peppering her with questions (firstly, to make sure she was alright; and secondly, to figure out the weird experience), then turned to Harry to do the same with him (except Harry had never been much one for theory, and his answers were less than satisfactory for the scholarly Doctor).

Reluctantly admitting that their plan for getting rid of Axos took precedence over his curiosity, the Doctor turned to Hermione: "Right! Let's see those equations!"

To Hermione's everlasting shock, the Doctor didn't seem to have any problem understanding the theory she was haltingly trying to convey (aided by his always spot on questions), despite not even believing in magic, let alone being familiar with the prerequisites of arithmantic-based spellcrafting; he was also, apparently, capable of juggling equations with an insane number of variables without breaking a sweat.

She was torn between awe and disbelief watching him.

In no time at all, he'd taken her sketched out model equations and run them through several iterative calibration and verification steps, checking the results against the intended and predicted effect and easily adjusting them to ensure any magical incompatibility was countered – despite having only heard her explanation on matching power-numbers once – and identifying the parameters they needed to make this work.

"That's... that's amazing. You actually solved the whole spellcrafting design in less than twenty minutes!" she breathed, awed and incredulous.

"I told you I'm good."

"But you knew nothing of magic!"

"_Very _good."

"Still one problem," pointed out Ron, from where he'd perched himself on one of the railings, waiting with usual patience for Hermione - and now the Doctor - to work out the bookworms' part. "The Disillusionment Charm works by touching the wand to the target. How are we going to touch a _planet_?"

"No, no, no, that's not the right question!" exclaimed the Doctor, bouncing towards the console to start inputting figures even as he talked. "See, your 'magic' is clearly a form of energy and energy can be channelled - granted it isn't easy, but since I'm very, very clever, I'll build a wireless energy transmitter adapted to precisely your form of energy to do it!"

"Wireless? What, like the radio?" asked Ron interestedly.

The Doctor scrunched his nose: "Not... quite. That's wireless telecommunication and all it needs to work is a signal sufficiently distinguishable from the background noise. What I'm going to do, is transmit energy from a power source – namely, your… 'wands', augmented by the Tardis' own power field – to an electrical load – that's the Axos sensors – without any artificial conductors."

He caught the blank stares on the others' faces and sighed: "It's not like the radio. More like... microwave ovens or laser barcode scanners, except, I'm going to use electrical conduction through natural media - specifically, the magnetosphere surrounding Earth, where the outward magnetic pressure of the planet's magnetic field is counterbalanced by the solar winds."

More blank stares.

"Trust me, it'll work!" said the Doctor curtly and finished inputting the arithmantic model into the Tardis' computer.

"But magic is not electrical energy!" protested Hermione, who'd more or less followed the quick explanation. "In fact, they're quite incompatible - anything electrical short-circuits in heavily magical environments."

"Which is why I need to build the transmitter instead of using the one I already have," replied the Doctor cheerfully. "Although I suppose I should call it a converter/transmitter, since it'll do both at once... Convitter?" he tried, almost tasting the words. "Transverter? …Transconverter?"

"Err... If you say so."

"Meanwhile, come here and have fun," said the Doctor resolutely and set them up with a few streaming channels and a video editing software, to patch together something resembling panic over a nuclear strike that they would feed the Axos because, as he pointed out, "Nobody would believe a planet could just be blown up without external interference if no-one on it had any clue about it."

Despite being a little uncertain, the four humans did, indeed, have fun with the task while their weird host threw himself into inventing the needed... 'transverter'.

All too soon, the Doctor was lying underneath the console, cursing in a musical, incomprehensible language, with sonic tools and strange parts scattered around him, which Rose dutifully passed him when asked.

Hermione and Ron took up monitoring the movie patchwork that would – hopefully – outwit the hostile alien. Harry reappeared after a while with mugs of tea for everybody, and just shrugged when his friends raised an eyebrow at him. The beautiful ship had nudged him towards the kitchen and he'd thought it was a good idea - that was all.

Once the Doctor was done, he bounced lightly to his feet and grinned widely. "Here we go! Now it's only a matter of rerouting your so-called 'spells' through the main deflector of the Axos' ship! Child's play, really."

Hermione bit her lip, feeling her stomach knot tightly like during OWLs exams: "You sure this will work? What if I made a mistake? What if…?"

The Doctor paid her no mind: "Ready?"

Under the tense and excited eyes of four humans and a Time Lord, the amazing sight that was planet Earth from space wavered and vanished for a fraction of a second, before being replaced by the slow rush of flames Rose had witnessed so long ago in the future.

The Earth was burning.

The four humans remained on the Tardis doorstep, watching their planet's ultimate fate being played out like an all-too-realistic movie.

The Doctor kept an eye on the awe-inspiring spectacle, while he carefully monitored the Tardis' sensors, adjusting the data transmission to ensure the Axos ship would be fooled, despite the numerous little inconsistencies of their projection, and ready to slip within its network security system at the first opportunity, to ensure it would go where he wanted it to.

Once the fire had engulfed the whole planet and flared brightly in the mimicry of a nucleus explosion, the smooth golden ship up and disappeared in a modest flash of white light, followed by the Doctor's triumphant cheering.

They let the memory of blazing rock fragments streaking through the void and towards the sun play out anyway.

"Well, I suppose that is that," said Harry at long last. "Hm. If you could take us back to Earth...?"

"I'm afraid that's out of the question," said the Doctor airily.


	6. It won't be quiet

**_It won't be _****_quiet,_**

_"Well, I suppose that is that," said Harry at long last. "Hm. If you could take us back to Earth...?"_

_"I'm afraid that's out of the question," said the Doctor airily._

"Excuse me?!"

Three gaping faces stared at him in incredulous indignation - and even Rose raised a surprised eyebrow at him, though she didn't say anything.

The Doctor's countenance turned extremely serious: "We still have no idea who you are, what's happened to the timelines, what your so-called 'magic' is, how you managed to time travel at this point of your history and-"

"So what!" screeched Hermione.

"You can't just keep us prisoner indefinitely!" shouted Harry furiously.

"Of course not!" retorted the Doctor just as loudly. "I just want you to stay around until I figure out what's going on. And it's not a matter of 'prisoners', I'd say 'guests' more than anything - really, who do you take me for?" he protested sullenly.

The three magic-users' expressions were growing stormy and it was clear that his words were doing little to calm their upset.

"Doctor?" intervened Rose, wishing to diffuse the situation. "I've been thinking and... I really think we're in a parallel universe. I mean, it's the only thing that makes sense. They do have magic, you've seen it...!"

Her attempt at changing the topic didn't work.

"We have things to do! People who'll miss us!" – "Who do you think you are!?" they thundered. "You have no right...!"

"Time machine!" the Doctor reminded them in a singsong voice. "I can take you back today in a few days, no-one will be the wiser."

"Can you, though?" asked Harry, sceptical and glaring. "I mean, the 'space' part of it has been definitely proven, but Hermione said time travel is impossible and..."

The witch, however, shook her head fervently: "After the way he manipulated that arithmantic model, _and _integrated magic with his technology, I believe he can do anything at all!"

Rose wasn't surprised in the least to see the smug look that admission put on the Doctor's face. "You think you're so impressive," she murmured fondly.

"I am so impressive!" came the familiar retort.

"Well, fine," allowed Harry, still glaring. "But that doesn't mean I wish to be kidnapped!"

"I'm not kidnapping you!" objected the Doctor.

"He's right," clamoured Ron at the same time, with a forbidding glower. "Take. Us. Back."

"Soon," promised the Doctor. "Just as soon as-"

"And how is that not kidnapping us?!" demanded Hermione shrilly.

Quickly, Rose stepped in again: "Look, you're right, I get you. I do," she insisted, raising her palms in a pleading gesture. "And if you really, truly want it, we'll get you back right now."

"Good!" the three exclaimed, even as the Doctor protested: "Rose!"

"But!" she said, raising her voice slightly. "Think about it, first, ok? Just... think of the possibilities. It's not kidnapping - I promise; it's... think of it as an opportunity, eh? All of time and space... If you stay, and help us figure this out, the Doctor'll take you on a trip. _Wherever you want_. Won't you?" she turned a meaningful gaze on the Time Lord.

"Ah!" the Doctor almost took a step back from her stare, wide-eyed. "Ah, well, that is, um... yes! Sure! Yes!" he said quickly. "A trip, of course, no problem."

Rapidly thinking it over, he realized that this way of going about things was much, much better than his own. He smiled proudly at Rose.

The sudden silence sounded loud, as the three magic-users gaped.

Finally Ron asked derisively: "What makes you think we want this?"

It was clear, though, that Harry at least was tempted - and Hermione wasn't far behind.

"Wherever we want?" she asked suspiciously.

"Wherever or _when_ever," the Doctor piled it on.

She bit her lip, torn, even as Harry mumbled something along the lines of: "... Well, maybe we could, you know, just... just for a while..."

Ron turned to gawk at his best friends. Then he closed his mouth with an audible snap. "Fine," he sighed. "Fine! I reckon you're mad, the pair of you, but if you really want to go looking for trouble-"

"I don't go looking for trouble!" protested Harry automatically, making Hermione quirk a small smile.

"-then fine – I'm with you," concluded Ron with a long-suffering glare.

Hermione hugged him weakly and Harry grinned sheepishly.

"_Molto Bene_!" exclaimed the Doctor delightedly.

"Aw. Don't be like that," Rose told a gloomy Ron with a friendly smile. "Trouble's just the bits in-between, you know. Out there… there's so much to see – new worlds and incredible creatures and impossible things! It's great!"

In spite of himself, Ron smiled back. "So long as you're planning to feed us," he grumbled good-naturedly. "I've had nothing but tea all day long. I'm starving!"

They laughed companionably and Rose took it upon herself to arrange a light dinner, with Harry's help, while the Doctor and a thoroughly fascinated Hermione started debating the nature of magic – and of time-travel.

Mostly, though, the Doctor was circling the issues of UNIT's absence and magic's presence, worrying at the matter through his own, growing unease. He just wasn't used to _not knowing_. It didn't sit well with him.

Rose, only distractedly keeping track of the discussion, steadfastly maintained her opinion that they'd slipped into a parallel universe.

"Not like it hasn't happened before, Doctor!" she insisted stubbornly.

"Yes, yes, but if you recall, we rather noticed!" retorted the Doctor. "While here – now – I'm not noticing _anything_. And that's…"

"Impossible?" Rose rolled her eyes.

"Unnerving."

"Parallel worlds…" mused Hermione, absently swirling the glass in her hand (the contents of which she'd discreetly transfigured into pumpkin juice). "I think I've read something of the sort. Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, 1947 or something like that."

"1954," corrected the Doctor in a negligent tone.

Hermione frowned and thought it over: "No, I'm pretty sure it was 1947," she said stiffly.

The Doctor smirked but before he could said anything, Harry rolled his eyes: "Does it matter?"

"Yeah, tell us what it's all about, instead," agreed Ron from where he was perusing the Sixties-style fridge (and also its contents).

Primly, Hermione recited: "Every single decision you make creates a parallel existence, a different dimension where things continue differently because of that single difference."

"Pretty much sums it up," nodded the Doctor.

The two wizards thought it over.

"That's ridiculous," declared Harry after a moment. "It's like saying that choices don't exist."

The Doctor frowned, baffled by the comment: "Of course they exist. That's precisely how alternate universes are created!"

"No, but," insisted Harry. "It's like, when Voldemort gave me the choice of joining him… I did the right thing and told him to go to hell, right? Only you're saying I also didn't."

"Voldemort?" snorted Rose, on the verge of guffawing. "That a real name?"

She placed a bowl of steaming spaghetti in a pesto sauce on the table, while Harry threw her a grin and finished setting the cutlery.

The Doctor scooped some spaghetti on his dish and added fresh banana roundels that he'd carelessly cut up on top. "Well, see, in a different universe…" he started, then trailed off at the vaguely horrified look Hermione was giving him. "What?"

He followed her gaze down to the bananas he was mixing into the green pasta, then looked up again. "Bananas are good!" he cried in mock-outrage.

She shuddered.

"But it was still me!" blurted out Harry, ignoring the food-related exchange entirely. "Same life up until that point, right? Same character, same morals…?"

"…Yeah?" said the Doctor leadingly.

"Well, that means I didn't really have a choice, did I? It's just dumb luck that I'm the me who turned him down and not the me who went off to be a Dark Wanker with him."

The Doctor paused with a bite of pesto-and-bananas half-way to his mouth.

Harry glowered mulishly at his own _spaghetti al pesto_ (without bananas). "That's… that's horrible. What's the point of it all, if we don't get to choose because anyway all the possible outcomes of a choice play out in a bloody universe somewhere?"

"Wow. Bit of a philosopher, aren't you?" wondered the Doctor with a small smile. "Anyway, it's not like that. Decohesion happens for each possible _outcome_. That means that the choice is made, and its _consequences_ are the sources of the splits. So, as I was saying, in a different universe you might have been killed for your choice. Or, the man in question might have asked again – become more persuasive, I don't know. That would prompt another choice, upon which you might have stuck to your morals, or been convinced, or…"

"Err… decohesion?" asked Rose as she took her place.

"The instantaneous process by which the world splits into a copy of itself for each possible outcome to an action," was the prompt explanation.

She didn't look any less lost, but Hermione interrupted: "But Everett's theory says that every decision is a point of origin for different universes!"

"No, no, no," retorted the Doctor. "It says that if an action has more than one possible outcome, the universe splits _when that action is taken_."

"What if the action is not taken?" asked Harry, still scowling.

"Oh, Harry," said Hermione a bit dismissively. "That is also 'taking an action' – only in the negative. Sort of like adding zero to a number: it's still a sum, isn't it?"

"…Not really."

"That's why I liked his terminology better," the Doctor said with a nod towards Harry. "You don't 'take an action', per se; you _make a choice_; which, yes, is put into effect by actions. And the outcomes of the choice..."

"…create the splits," concluded Rose. "Oi, this actually kind of makes sense!"

Harry thought it over a little longer. "That means... Ok, well, but suppose you found yourself in a life-or-death situation: then if you're alive here, that means that in a parallel universe, you are dead?"

The Doctor looked at him strangely: "You're a barrel of laughs, aren't you?"

"You've just told me that I've died a number of times!" protested Harry with the kind of gallows humour Sybil Trelawney had taught him. "I think I'm allowed to find this a bit disturbing." He had an amused glint in his eyes.

Rose, too, was giving him a weird look, but Ron and Hermione had grown used to his whimsical joking after the war and didn't bat an eye.

Anyway, the red-head was busy contemplating his loaded fork, perplexed. "So…" he tried with a little hesitation. "There's a world being born for every moment I think about eating this but choose to wait instead?" He grimaced doubtfully. "Awful lot of worlds crowding up the space, then. Where do they all fit?"

Harry snickered at the image of irritated, bubble-like worlds elbowing each other aside, that Ron had evoked.

The Doctor rolled his eyes almost fondly: "Well, I can see where you might believe that, but no. Definitely not. You eating your spaghetti or not is not a choice important enough to warrant the creation of an alternate timeline… much less a parallel universe."

"Why not? Who are you to say if a choice is important or not?..." challenged Hermione, belligerently.

"I'm a Time Lord," replied the Doctor pointedly.

Rose snorted a laugh at his typical arrogance, seeing that it was doing nothing but fluster and irritate their brown-haired guest.

With an overly-dramatic, long-suffering sigh, the Doctor explained: "Time's in flux. Well, mostly, but still. At any given instant, everything is possible. Everything can happen. Infinite options. Infinite varieties. A fuzzy bunch of timelines spiralling off from any point, wavering around stability without reaching it, fluttering through ever-shifting probabilities. And I can see it," he went on with growing enthusiasm. "Because I _see_ the timelines – all the bunch of potentialities stemming from a person, a place, an action – and I see when and how a certain choice, big or small, affects them."

He balanced himself on two legs of the chair and went on: "Sometimes a choice makes the potential timelines waver a little, vibrate around a small set of possibilities that still maintain the same general direction – but the way to get there can be better or worse depending on that choice. That's when I usually step in, give things a nudge in the right direction." He winked at Rose.

"Other times, a certain choice, big or small, is in fact so pivotal that it leads to completely different timelines. Judging the possibility, and even more, the opportunity, for intervention in such cases is a lot more delicate, and in general, more important."

He paused only for a moment. "That's the difference between a Time Lord and a human, you see. You lot, you can't tell. I can. _I can always tell_ whether a choice is relevant to the establishing of stable timelines or not."

"Always?" repeated Harry, trying to imagine what it might be like to 'see' time like the Doctor was describing (and not quite managing).

Suddenly, the Time Lord grinned: "Oh, yes! Be it someone being born who wasn't supposed to, the assassination of a monarch… or picking strawberry instead of raspberry jam."

Rose snorted and when he turned to her in mock-indignation, she giggled.

"Rose Tyler, I'll have you know that I'm perfectly serious! Jam choosing can be a very important business," said the Doctor earnestly.

When she raised an eyebrow in challenge, he didn't disappoint: "Serenity Lailon, human, born in the 62nd century. She'd never tasted strawberries before, they didn't grow on her home planet. Tasting the strawberry jam instead of the familiar raspberry one inspired her – she set off into deep space on a recycled pick-up spaceship cobbled together by her brother, became the greatest explorer of her century, discovered no less than 347 between planets and asteroids, including the europium mines on Astra that financed all her other explorations, and traced stable routes enabling colonization of the previously unknown Delta Quadrant. All because she tried strawberry jam. Imagine if she hadn't!"

He grinned.

"On the other hand, Winston Churchill once had to choose between orange and blueberry jam – I was there, you know – and nothing whatsoever changed because of his eventual decision."

Laughing, Rose got up and got some ice-cream out as dessert, which perked the Doctor right up: "Oh, I didn't know we had any left!" he cheered, fishing a spoon from one of his amazing pockets.

Hermione wasn't one to let things lie, however. "But how _can_ you tell?" she insisted sceptically. "It makes no sense that you would be able to recognize something based on its consequences when it happens before its consequences."

"Well, if I couldn't, how could I go around changing things?" pouted the Doctor, whose attention was now dedicated to his bowl of strawberry ice-cream more than to the discussion. "Meddling with the past is extremely dangerous, as you should know," he shook his spoon at her to underline those few admonishing words. "Paradoxes and infinity loops and whatnot. Imagine if I stumbled upon a fixed point and didn't know it! I might try and change it – forget blowing up the universe: that would unravel time itself."

"What's a fixed point?" asked Ron, who found himself surprisingly interested.

The Doctor sighed, determinedly finishing his ice-cream in silence, then spotted the expectant looks on his guests' faces and sighed again, looking to the ceiling as if hoping for inspiration. Explaining this kind of things to non-Time Lords was, in general, a complete waste of time (not least because few languages besides Gallifreyan had the necessary words to shape such concepts), but for some reason he caught himself trying every time.

"From the inside," he started slowly, "a choice-moment in time is always an infinity that will solidify into a reality through actualization… but whether that reality is interchangeable with a better or worse one, or whether an alternate resolution is so incompatible that it will require an entirely different universe to pan out, that depends on the nature of the moment in the fabric of time."

There was a baffled silence, dotted with a couple, mystified: "...What?"

"You lot... You're stuck on the idea that time is linear, when actually, from a non-subjective viewpoint... oh, never mind." The Doctor ran a hand through his hair. "You – meaning humans; you tend to think that something which happens as a consequence of something else isn't real until its cause comes to pass, because you believe consequences always follow causes linearly, while in reality, one of the first rules of Time is that causality isn't necessarily linear at all and shouldn't be confused with sequentiality."

Rose's gaze was a little glazed, but she was dutifully listening anyway, chin resting on one of her hands; he found it just a little bit adorable.

"If you could," he went on, "see the entire myriad of potential timelines surrounding a person, like I can, you'd know this immediately because in each of those timelines, the particular consequences that shape it _are_ real. Of course, seeing the timelines means little if you don't know how to interpret them. It is a matter of being able to tell whether a moment, while pivotal, will nevertheless actuate a path utterly equivalent to any other except for minor details, well, I say minor, that's minor in the grand scheme of things, at least, but the point is, it will maintain reality unified, only changing the superficial level of how it is perceived; in which case I can nudge things towards the timeline I prefer..." he winked again at Rose, who grinned back, amused.

The three wizards' attention was riveted on him.

"Sometimes..." he sobered slightly. "Sometimes there will be no timeline that doesn't pass through exactly a particular set of events and consequences. And it will be because of a single moment. That? That single moment? That tiny moment. _That's_ a fixed point. The moment in which an individual makes a decision that cuts off all the options in the universe. The infinity is gone – and we have a fixed point in time, never to be rewritten."

He paused for a moment.

"That's what a Time Lord knows, what I've been trained to recognize. The relevance – or irrelevance, as the case maybe – of a choice."

He could see they didn't really get it, but they were interested anyway. It depressed and made him smile at once and he shook his head to clear it, shying away from what it might mean – as usual unwilling to face anything resembling introspection.

"And you can... see these fixed points?" asked Harry a little uncertainly, but gamely.

"Yes. Well... 'seeing' is not the proper verb, perhaps... but. Yes."

"But how?" insisted Hermione, almost petulantly.

The Doctor shook his head impatiently: "Just accept that I can, alright? For me, it's just a matter of focus. Mind you, it can give me the mother of all headaches…"

"I can't 'just accept' something!"

"Why not?" grumbled Harry. "You accept magic works like books tell you it does all the time."

She shot him a venomous look. Ron snickered.

The Doctor sighed again, feeling unaccountably tired and very, very lonely. "Part of it is training, as I said," he volunteered.

"Can we learn to, then?" whispered Hermione, clearly fascinated.

"Not without timesenses." The Doctor shook his head, ignoring her crushed expression.

Rose, on the other hand, was looking at him pensively, somewhat troubled; but when she caught his eyes, she smiled cheekily: "So when we go around doing our saving-the-world bit, we're changing only minor things?"

"Rose Tyler, there is nothing minor to what we do!" he protested, a little cheered by her brightness.

She raised an eyebrow at him meaningfully.

"We-ell… sometimes it's more about fixing the damage someone else has done to the timelines because they have no clue what they're on about," he allowed.

She snorted.

"But when we just meddle out of the goodness of our hearts… yes, basically. Still, a superficial reality without an evil dictator murdering people left and right must be better than one _with_ them, right? Worth the effort and all that?"

Rose smiled freely: "Sure."

"So that's what you do? Go around making people's lives better?" asked Harry, curious and amazed and not a little envious.

"But the kind of meddling you're talking about is impossible," complained Hermione, who was feeling pettily grumpy. "For one, you'd be part of the events from the moment you interfered, which means you've always been part of the events. So you wouldn't be meddling. Just playing your part."

"Bit of a know-it-all, aren't you?" commented the Doctor, amused.

Hermione scowled ferociously. "And wouldn't you change the outcome of an event simply by observing it?"

Now it was the Doctor's turn to scowl: "Heisenberg was an idiot. And rude to boot. Don't listen to him. If observing were enough to meddle my entire culture would never have developed…"

"Are you seriously accusing someone else of being rude?" asked Rose, laughter in her voice.

"Well, he was prone to gloat," pouted the Doctor. "We went for a nice, long walk one evening, having a discussion about stuff, and you wouldn't believe the nonsense he insisted on feeding me!"

Harry however had tuned out the latest tangent while he polished off his ice-cream, because a different – _wonderful, terrifying, exhilarating_ – thought had struck him. He went over it a few times and then asked aloud, an audible wave of longing in his voice: "Wait, wait. Back up a bit. These parallel universes. You can move from one to the other?"

The Doctor glanced at him and then suddenly glared, but it was tempered by a well of sad understanding and compassion: "I know what you're thinking and the answer is, absolutely NOT! You can't try and find a world where your loved ones didn't die or where something horrible didn't happen. Just... no."

Harry scowled, obviously torn between feeling guilty and defiant.

"I understand. Really, I do," said Rose with gentle compassion. "When we stumbled upon that parallel world and I found out my father was still alive… well, I couldn't let it go. I had to know – to meet him. And… in the end, it wasn't a good idea."

"Gingerbread houses!" cried the Doctor with a pout. Hermione and Ron looked at him weirdly.

"But you did meet him! So it is possible to cross worlds!" crowed Harry in triumph.

But the Doctor shook his head: "Not anymore. Used to be easy. When the Time Lords kept their eye on everything, you could hop between realities, home in time for tea. Then they died, took it all with them. The walls of reality closed, the worlds were sealed. Not anymore."

His voice had grown sad and burdened, but Harry refused to notice: "But you just said you did!"

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair tiredly: "When we did it... well, it was an accident. I still have no idea what happened. We fell out of the time vortex, through the Void..."

"The Void?" interrupted Hermione.

"The Void is... nothingness. Nowhere. Some sort of no-place, a silent realm, a lost dimension..."

"But…!" insisted Harry – only to be stopped by Ron's hand squeezing his arm in warning.

The red-head, having relished his meal with gusto, leaned back in his chair and looked straight at the Doctor, but without releasing his best friend: "Ok, look. I don't think this is getting us anywhere. So there are parallel universes, fine. So what?" he asked. " 'Cause you said this _isn't_ a parallel universe, if I remember right. And aren't you supposed to figure out all those questions you think are so important? So that we can go home?"

Harry and Hermione both glared at him, but he stared back defiantly. The only parallel universe he might be interested in would be one where Fred didn't… - but he knew better than to expect the price to pay wouldn't be worse. Magic taught you soon that the dead can't come back – and if you try and violate that rule, the consequences are harsh. Could he accept to see Ginny dead instead? Or his Mum? Or…

No, he wouldn't think about it. That way lay madness.

"Good point," allowed the Doctor.

He frowned, having worked through the problem all the while, and not liking the uncertainty of his conclusions one bit.

"You really have no idea?" asked Rose, a little surprised.

The Doctor grimaced. "Oh, I have plenty of ideas. Heaps and loads. I am a veritable fountains of ideas, Rose Tyler. The only problem is that all of them are impossible." He grimaced, then looked up at the ceiling again, thoughtful. "Unless..."

"Well?" demanded Hermione loudly.

"Unless they weren't just parallels," the Doctor muttered, gaze distant. "That… that might actually explain…" He frowned some more.

"Doctor?..." tried Rose after a while, a gentle hand on his arm.

He focused on her, but his mind was very clearly still miles away: "I need to check… Oh, it's probably ridiculous… but then again…"

Abruptly, he got up from the table and strode over to the nearest door. Very obligingly, the Tardis let it open directly into the library. "Now, where did I put that book, I wonder?" he mused aloud.

The other four scrambled to follow him and stopped abruptly just past the threshold, except Rose who was familiar with the place.

"Oh, my!" gasped Hermione in shocked wonder.

Literally thousands of books were gathered in the impressive, rectangular room with a flat ceiling lost in shadows far above their heads.

Several geometrically regular storeys ran all around the perimeter, harmoniously articulated into wide niches by slender pillars and arches and furnished from floor to ceiling with shelving filled with books: they looked down to the room the five of them were in through thin, convoluted balustrades. Brass ladders provided access to these upper levels, and there was an actual spiral staircase in a far corner, with a sculptured railing as delicately graceful as a lace.

The floor under their feet was warm, dark and wooden and the walls were smoothly plastered and decorated with flowery frescos, which, along with the cosy-looking couches and armchairs arranged here and there in small circles around low tables, countered the grandiose, classical rigor of the room's proportions and broke its symmetry pleasantly, making it more welcoming.

Almost as if in a trance, Hermione moved slowly along the nearest shelves, eyes wide at the variety of alphabets and languages, careful fingers stroking the spines lightly as she went. "This is bigger than the Hogwarts Library!" she whispered in disbelief.

"Blimey. How do you find anything in here without magic?" asked Ron, for once seriously impressed.

"I have a fantastic memory," bragged the Doctor.

"That, and the Tardis uses her Telepathic Circuits and - what was it you called it? Architectural Configuration Program? - to help us find whatever we're looking for," said Rose, throwing an amused look at her favourite alien.

The Doctor's mock-pout just made her laugh.

While the newcomers looked around in awe, he disappeared through the shelving and quickly came out again with a couple of volumes filled with rows and rows of the complicated swirling lines the monitor of the Tarids provided, which Rose had learned to recognize as Gallifreyian.

A moment later, Hermione was approaching him, questions on the tip of her tongue – although she was much less confrontational and much more respectful than earlier. The sight of so many books seemed to have changed her opinion of the Doctor quite thoroughly.

For his part, he was skimming through the books at high speed, the black-rimmed specs once more perched on his nose.

"Oh, I'm too tired to pour through books!" moaned Ron.

He drudged himself to a small loveseat ensconced between two tall shelving units and dragged it out with a powerful pull. Distractedly, he waved his wand over it, transfiguring it into a squishy, worn-out and familiar copy of his mother's sofa, only in orange instead of brown, throwing himself on it with a happy sigh.

A moment later, he squeaked as he was unceremoniously dumped on the floor, his sofa having inexplicably disappeared.

Frowning and muttering to himself - because it wasn't exactly unheard-of for his transfigurations to fail, but wouldn't it have reverted to the original shape instead of vanishing? - Ron tried again, carefully conjuring the longed-for sofa out of thin air.

He sat on it gingerly, bouncing a little to check its degree of reality, then grinned in satisfaction and threw himself back on it... and yelped loudly when he landed on the floor again.

He stood, glaring murderously at the spot where no trace of his conjuration remained. Just what was going on?

After a long moment, the original loveseat morphed into existence, sort of slowly growing from the very wall and then dethatching itself with a soft pop.

Ron gaped, completely stunned. What kind of magic was that?

A chuckle came from behind him. The Doctor was there, glasses still perched on his nose and a book open in his hands.

"The Tardis is rather miffed that you not only dislike her furniture, but took it upon yourself to change it," he explained, still chuckling. "She also has a very poor opinion of your taste."

"What!?" Ron gaped at him, then rounded on the loveseat, offended: "That's my mum's sofa you're disparaging, you... you ship!"

He brandished his wand and went about changing the loveseat again, slashing through the movements with a vengeance. As soon as he'd completed the transfiguration, he added a ward around it.

The Tardis wavered for a moment, irritated that she couldn't get to the horrid sofa anymore, then promptly moved the whole warded bubble to a faraway storage room, effectively wiping out Ron's smug smirk.

The Doctor chuckled again: "I'll leave you to your quarrel, then, shall I?"

Ron ignored him. "This is war!" he grumbled in mid-voice, eyes narrowed at the vacant spot where 'his' sofa had been. He rolled up his sleeves and set to work.

The Doctor sent an affectionate thought at his ship, conveying his full confidence that she could handle the boy, and left them to it.

Given Ron's preoccupation with struggling over molecular rearrangements with a ship both smarter and more stubborn than him, and the Doctor's and Hermione's fervent descent in their own private world of research (Hermione's star-struck eyes were proof enough that her opinion of the Doctor was steadily rising), Rose and Harry rather naturally gravitated together.

And found, to their surprise, that they had a lot in common.

Even among wizards, there weren't many who could relate to experiences such as being turned to stone (even if for Harry, it was an indirect understanding), being thrown into a tournament (or TV game, as it were) against their will, or meeting their dead father... sort of.

On the other hand, Harry had never even conceived something like the Daleks; while Rose, for her part, had no familiarity with Acromantulas (not that she minded: they sounded horrid).

They chatted amiably, trading outrageous – but surprisingly, strictly true – stories of their past adventures and discussing matters such as floo powder versus time windows in firecalls and the possibility of goblins being related to the cynrog, dark green aliens with wrinkled and ridged skin, greasy hair and pug-like noses.

The discussion about werewolves was particularly lively (and for all that Harry was a staunch supporter of their rights, he had to concede to Rose that being chased by a fully transformed one was terrifying).

All in all, they were rather having a grand time of it.

Harry felt more accepted by this odd blonde girl than from 90% of his former schoolmates and was thrilled to meet someone who promised to be as good a friend as Luna.

As for Rose, despite her Mum's and Mickey's loving support, she didn't really have someone with whom she could discuss the amazing, but sometimes terrifying, things she saw and did (not without the risk of facing another round of 'come back home, that alien is too dangerous'). She was delighted: it was almost like having Jack back, only without all the flirting and innuendos.

However, it wasn't long before Rose's yawning started getting conspicuous – and contagious – and once he noticed, the Doctor was adamant in sending them all to bed - heedless of Hermione's loud pleading (and gushing about his books).

"None of that, now. Humans need sleep - in fact, you waste away a third of your lives sleeping. A true pity, that, but I know better than to keep you lot up - you'll end up growling and intractable, or muzzy and stupid."

"Thanks a bunch," muttered Harry.

"Come on," said Rose, gesturing towards the double doors. "I'll help you find rooms."

It didn't take them long to find a corridor leading to a wooden door with a rampant lion engraved at eye level. Inside, they found a cosy circular room decorated with scarlet tapestries, with a merry fire in a large fireplace, three squashy armchairs around it and a rather unexpected bulletin board hanging on the wall.

"This looks like the Gryffindor Common Room!" exclaimed Harry in surprised delight.

"I think those might lead to your rooms," said Rose, indicating the three wooden doors scattered around the room. "I'll leave you to settle in, shall I?"

"Awesome," declared Harry happily, while Hermione went off in her own little world, speculating aloud about telepathic ships, rooms of requirements and the nature of magic in general, and Ron sulked at how the welcoming armchair he tried to sit on turned into an uncomfortable, wooden chair under him.

Rose hovered for a moment, torn between sympathy and amusement. "If I were you, I'd try apologizing," she advised the red-head, fighting down a grin.

Glaring stubbornly, he tried instead to transfigure some sort of upholstery onto the straight back.

Rose left him to his probably doomed efforts, shaking her head.

The morning after, Harry met Rose in the corridor outside his room and they made their way to the kitchen together, only for her to stop abruptly in the doorway.

"What are you doing to the toaster?" she asked suspiciously.

The Doctor looked up with a deer-in-headlights expression, frozen with the sonic screwdriver in a very compromising position over the metal entrails of the poor kitchen appliance.

Rose gave in with a long-suffering sigh: "Just so long as it isn't anything explosion-related." And she busied herself with making tea.

The Doctor shot an apologetic look at Harry.

"Nah, don't worry," said the wizard easily. "I've grown up with Seamus 'I'll-manage-rum-someday' Finnigan. Explosions at the breakfast table are nothing new to me."

The Doctor chuckled.

Ron appeared next, looking rather dishevelled and muttering angrily about cold showers and lights turning on and off the whole night. He dropped into a chair and didn't even return the Doctor's amiable "Hello!"

Judging by Ron's dark scowl and the murderous way he glowered at his bright pink table set, his competition over furniture with the Tardis was still in full swing.

Wisely, Harry didn't comment.

"So how's your research going?" asked Rose when everybody's breakfast was over.

"Oh, I figured it all out!" exclaimed the Doctor exuberantly.

"What?!" screeched the newly arrived Hermione, startling them all. "What do you mean you figured it out!? What is it, then? Why didn't you wait for me? I could have helped! What have you concluded? What...?"

The frantic questions were muffled by Ron's hand, which turned Hermione's energy to glaring furiously at him; unfazed, he gave his girlfriend a long-suffering smile and then kissed her soundly.

"Give the man a break, love," he muttered affectionately into her lips.

Huffing, but calmer, Hermione turned to offer everybody a sheepish good-morning, then zeroed expectantly on the Doctor, sitting close to him and almost quivering with excited interest.

His automatic protest that there was no such thing as a morning on the Tardis died in the face of her zeal. She even produced a pen and a small notebook and kept it at the ready, like a schoolgirl anxious to make her teacher proud. A far cry from the day before, when she had scowled and glared and kept her arms crossed in front of her like an armour against the Doctor's maniacal attitude! Now she was clearly entranced, hanging on his every word, stars in her eyes.

Harry chuckled and pushed a cup of tea into her nearest hand, while Ron sneaked a couple of jam-covered bagels on her plate, rolling his eyes fondly.

The Doctor cleared his throat, feeling the slightest bit self-conscious. "Yes, right. Well. A-hem. I've reviewed all the theory from back in the day, and everything you've told me about the history of your world and the theory of your magic, and I've come to a conclusion," said the Doctor, catching everybody's attention.

"So was I right?" asked Rose teasingly. "Are we in a parallel universe?"

"I think," he said slowly and deliberately, as if he was tasting his hypothesis as he said it aloud, "that the term 'parallel' might be misguiding in this instance. I think we might be closer if we say we're in a 'divergent' universe."

There was a pause.

"Err... and the difference is?" asked Rose, not very impressed.

"What keeps two universes in parallel is the existence across them of certain fixed points in time. By which I mean, that some unalterable events occur in every parallel universe as fixed points in time, effectively 'locking' those universes in parallel."

He massaged his chin with one hand, thoughtfully. "The original speculation was that such binding events would happen across every 'near' continuity similar to our own, thus preventing anyone or anything belonging to that reality from reaching across to our universe easily. That was proven false when a Time Lady known as the Developer elaborated a theory which instead _used_ such transversal fixed points as… bridges, if you will. Thus allowing cross-dimensional travel, under carefully monitored circumstances of course, even to 'mirror universes' – those parallel universes where the patterns of events move in indistinguishable manners but the intentions and characterizations are different."

"Now, this…" he showed them a thick book with a rich, ornate cover. "This is one of the basic texts about temporal physics. _The Elegance of Time_." He grimaced. "I hated it when I was a student – we all did – but there's no denying that it is thorough. Rodageitmutaldeitaliulvesorghackar was one of the most revered philosophers during my time at the Academy… all of his writings were mandatory – and believe me, he wrote a lot. Loved to put circles to paper, that one."

"…Was that really a name?" asked Rose, sounding fascinated.

"Part of it," said the Doctor shortly. "No-one'd use an _actual_ name in public."

Rose started: "What? Why?"

"Never mind that!" he cut her short. "The point is, if a parallel world grows distant enough from the original source universe the bridging fixed points are no longer shared and the evolution of timelines grows too different for comparisons. That's why the Tardis isn't affected! This universe is so different that it can _coexist_ with ours. No drain on her energy! Though she won't be able to recharge either – which is bad."

"Not petrol in a diesel engine?" tried Rose, sounding uncertain.

"No, no... more like water, I'd say. But water in a diesel engine can be just as dangerous!" lectured the Doctor. "It can cause the fuel injector tips to explode, cause sudden cooling in the engine, excessive injector wear, filter plugging, power loss, corrosion – all sorts of problems! It generally result in shortened engine life. Not good." He pouted for a brief moment. "On the other hand... the Tardis isn't really a diesel engine, is she? Not even close. She won't be harmed, in fact, she won't be _anything_ – it's like drinking _only_ water, not harmful, rather the opposite, but in the long run, you'd starve."

"Wait. What did this Rodag-… Rodaigmu-…" Hermione stumbled over the unfamiliar collection of syllables of the intricate name.

The Doctor rolled his eyes: "Just call him the Theorist. It's the name he chose for himself. Simpler that way."

"…Right," agreed Hermione uncertainly. "Anyway, what did he mean by 'parallels growing distant'? Two parallel lines are always equidistant at all points!... By definition!"

"Not in multidimensional geometry," replied the Doctor cheerfully. "Besides, this is 'parallel' as in 'having the same direction, course, or nature' rather than 'parallel' as 'never converging or diverging'."

"Aren't all parallel worlds diverging, though? They start off at one common point and go on in different ways. Like with zeppelins instead of planes," said Rose, frowning in concentration.

"Well, yes, in a way – good point, actually!" he beamed. "Only, with parallel universes it's more or less like a controlled-access highway. You can have lanes with different traffic composition, but all going in the same direction. You can even go at different speeds on different lanes, resulting in time differentials between the parallels; but you'll get to the same toll booths – the fixed points."

Rose looked unsure. "What does that mean for where we are now?"

"Ah, that!" said the Doctor happily, then immediately corrected himself: "No, no. The freeway metaphor won't work for this. See, the fact is that the split between our source universe and this one happened centuries ago! A whole new world, Rose, not just with a different history: with different _rules_!"

Fighting not to be swept up in his contagious enthusiasm, Rose pointed out: "It looked pretty much like ours, though. Not even zeppelins in the sky."

"Oh, Rose Tyler, their split was of such a magnitude that the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 simply cannot compare!" told her the Doctor. "In fact, if we'd stayed around enough to, say, visit a museum, we'd have found some interesting surprises. Their history was rather dramatically different…" he paused for a second, dramatically: "until 1692!"

"The Statute of Secrecy!" cried Hermione, getting it faster than anybody else.

"Precisely! Hiding away not only the existence, but also most _memories_ of the split, it sort of... kind of... reversed the divergence, so to speak. It's pretty amazing when you think of it. Centuries of differences, and then, just like that, the decision makers are inexplicably pushed towards a path more and more similar to the one our universe's Earth followed."

"History repeating itself?" joked Rose.

"Yes! Or, well, people repeating themselves, at least. Human nature being what it is, and all that."

They shook their heads, amazed.

The Doctor mused aloud: "In a way, we're now in a _reconverging_ universe – their seventeenth century had a few things in common with ours, the eighteenth and nineteenth a lot more… the Age of Sail, just to name something; and Queen Victoria." They shared a grin. "By the time WWII rolled around, it did so in both universes – but! And here's the cinch! With very different driving forces behind it. In fact, it was a _wizard_ who manipulated several governments into the war. No Hitler in this world – not that it made much of a difference, when there were others ready to take his place."

"What, really?" Rose asked, taken aback.

"Yup. Just a bloke called Grindelwald."

"He was one of the most powerful Dark Wizards of all time," interjected Hermione, as often unable to keep herself from showing off her knowledge. "He tried to lead a revolution with the aim of overturning the International Statute of Secrecy and creating a global order led by witches and wizards, who in his vision are superior to muggles and therefore should rule over the 'second-class citizens' who don't have magical powers."

Rose raised an unimpressed eyebrow: "Same difference, then."

"Unfortunately, yes," agreed the Doctor.

Rose sighed. "Well, what does this all mean for us?" she asked, intrigued but confused.

The Doctor's face split in a huge grin: "That magic is real!"

Ron snorted loudly and grumbled: "I told you that from the very start!"

Everybody chuckled.

"Ok," continued Rose slowly. "So we're in a parallel universe, which is sufficiently different from ours to include the existence of magic."

"Divergent universe. Or, reconvergent if you want. Maybe 'alternate' is best…"

"Alternate universe. Ok," nodded Rose. "Is this good or bad?"

"Bad," was the instant reply. "Well, I say bad. It could have been worse, you know. We could be in a universe where humans evolved breathing nitrogen. After all, there's a lot more of it than oxygen in your atmosphere, it might have made sense. Evolutionarily speaking."

"_Our _atmosphere?" squeaked Hermione. "Don't you breathe oxygen too?"

She was ignored.

"And generally speaking, it is better than a parallel universe. Less temptations, for one, and it doesn't affect the Tardis, as you might have noticed."

"So why's it bad?" asked Rose, confused.

The Doctor hesitated, but answered: "One, because there are - supposedly - many threats moving along the currents of the time vortex from the beginning of the universe, namely the Chronovores which... err... feed on beings like the Tardis; b... no- two: because returning to our proper universe might not be as easy as I'd like. Especially since I still have no idea how we ended up in this one!"

"You've never mentioned Chronovores!"

"Because the Time Lords got rid of them long before Rassilon even passed into the Matrix. Since I've never run into a reference to this type of magic-users before, however, there is a good chance that my people never reached this particular universe, thus never hunting the Chronovores to extinction."

"Great."

"Oh, well, it wouldn't matter if I knew how we ended up here. Or better still, how to go back."

Rose sighed deeply. "Research?"

"Research!"

Not particularly interested in the impending book frenzy, Harry chose to explore the magnificent ship instead.

It was a lot like wandering the halls of Hogwarts, except that the Tardis felt more... aware; she certainly interacted more with him – flashing lights and ostentatiously unlocking doors and chiming little bell-sounds in answer to his queries or comments – and he wasn't complaining. She was good company.

She obligingly let him find, in quick succession, an empty room with a gramophone blaring opera music, a little shop-like room with shelves of knick-knacks and a tall counter, a small bedroom entirely done in shades of blue, an empty cavern-like room with stalactites covering its ceiling, a labyrinth of mirrors (much like a mirror-house in an amusement park, which rather delighted Harry for a good while), a different kitchen from the one they'd used the day before (where he managed to put together a few sandwiches, blithely ignoring the improbable colours of what he trusted were hams and cheeses), a perfect copy of Sybil Trelawny's classroom (which he hurriedly left behind), a cricket field and finally the swimming pool, where he found Rose was relaxing under what felt like real sunlight, though it obviously couldn't be.

"My brain has reached its daily quota of cramming," she confided and he nodded sagely. Hermione could have that effect.

The Tardis led him to a futuristic race stadium next, complete with _flying motorbikes_, and he didn't refrain from lavishing her with compliments, cooing over her utter brilliantness. She was truly special.

He decided to call it a day when his stomach started grumbling again and made his way back to the others, stopping only to rescue poor Ron from a bare, cell-like room whose doors had remained stuck – apparently – for hours. The red-head was grumbling nonsense about running into himself and stupid ships driving him mad the whole way back, while Harry did his best not to laugh.

Meanwhile, the two scholars of the group, who'd apparently remained in the library the whole time, had actually made progress, in that the Doctor had not only isolated the particular incident that had resulted in their presence here and now, but also gained a somewhat clear idea of where, exactly, 'here and now' was.

Judging by his dull look and dejected sprawl, however, it wasn't all good news.

While Rose peppered him with questions, Ron made a beeline for Hermione, who was reading a tome with a colourful cover intently and seemed by turn wryly amused and deprecatingly embarrassed.

"What are you reading?" he asked eagerly, simply because he hadn't seen her for ages.

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," she answered absently.

Ron and Harry both froze. "Err... what?"

"One universe's reality is another's fiction. Classic," threw in the Doctor, who didn't look like he wanted to get up from where he was sprawled any time this century.

Hermione put the book down and sighed wryly: "There's a whole series – one volume for each of our years in Hogwarts." She motioned to a small pile next to her. "This one's the fourth and, I quote: 'follows Harry Potter, a wizard in his fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the mystery surrounding the entry of Harry's name into the Triwizard Tournament, in which he is forced to compete'."

"You're joking."

"I wish," she replied. "Look!" And she showed him a drawing that was, unmistakably, a younger version of the three of them before Hagrid's hut.

Ron stared at her, incredulous: "We're... book characters?"

Harry moaned: "Why am I not surprised?"

"It's surprisingly accurate," she said fairly. "Although I don't remember us squabbling quite that much."

Ron picked up the nearest one. "_Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_," he read aloud, in total disbelief. He skimmed the pages and stopped halfway through, where his name caught his eye: " 'You'd be surprised', said Ron, who was looking apprehensively at the book. 'Some of the books the Ministry's confiscated—Dad's told me—there was one that burned your eyes out. And everyone who read _Sonnets of a Sorcerer_ spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives'... Blimey. I _remember_ this!"

"Did they really?" asked the Doctor, perking up with interest.

"What?"

"Speak in limericks all the time," he elaborated. "That sounds kind of cool. We-ell… also really really annoying I suppose…"

Ron slammed the book down on the nearest table. "That's not the point," he gritted out.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows and Ron deflated: "It's just… I remember saying this stuff! And now it's in a book! A book that says I've said it!"

"Yeah, that actually happens to me now and then." The Doctor grimaced. "It's always irritating. But look at the bright side!"

"There's a bright side?" asked Harry in disbelief.

"It's all in the past!" the Doctor beamed.

He was met with blank looks awaiting clarification.

"You won't have to do it!" insisted the Doctor. "You've already done it."

"…You're not making a lick of sense," said Ron disgustedly.

"It's blurred," exclaimed Rose surprised. She had wandered closer and picked up one of the books, but could not make out the title, or even the picture clearly, much less the text inside. In fact, it was giving her a slight headache.

"It's the Tardis," explained the Doctor with a tired sigh. "She's not only blurring the text, but also our memories of it. That's why you three seem so familiar but I can't really place you."

"You mean I've read these books?" asked Rose wonderingly. "I can't remember a thing!"

"Why would she do something like this?" asked Harry in confusion.

"To prevent any foreknowledge from affecting my actions."

"That makes no sense," pointed out Rose. "She doesn't when we get to meet authors and historical characters and such."

"Yes, but I'm not well-tuned enough to this universe's timelines and that makes everything more dangerous."

"Was that English?"

The Doctor sighed deeply and then, reluctantly, explained further: "My planet was located in a rift, where every single universe converges. Or, most of them at least. Supposedly. Anyway, that's why there was only one Gallifrey; no other universe has one now, because it existed in all at once - and when it was... lost... it was lost for all at once."

"Lost? How do you lose a planet?" asked Harry, taken aback.

The Doctor stiffened but ignored him. "However... I spent a very large portion of my life in our universe, Rose, even back when dimensional travel was achievable; and furthermore, I've been effectively trapped in it ever since... ever since..."

He gulped, unable to finish. Rose grabbed his hand and squeezed, eyes dark and empathetic.

"So you don't feel the timelines here? Or... not as clearly?"

"That's right."

"Is that why you find this place unnerving? Because it's not like you, to react as you have been..."

The Doctor shook his head: "Time Lords grow up seeing, feeling, _breathing_ Time. It's a base instinct that gets sharpened and honed to perfection during the years at the Academy, until that's how we see the Universe. Rose... Every waking second I can see what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That's the burden a Time Lord carries. But... it is also _who I am_. Who I've been for longer than you can contemplate. And suddenly, I'm... not sure. Oh, I can still see the timelines and I have enough experience to move around without great problems, of course, but I'm no longer sure. _I'm not sure, Rose._"

Rose was silent, never letting go of his hand.

"So… your ship, she's reducing the risk by blurring the memories?" asked Harry interestedly.

"Yes. Because if I knew how things go, I'd be tempted to change them, meddle a little; and without being _completely_ aware of timelines, it could spell disaster. Here and now, I can't even trust my instincts to tell me what's in flux and what's fixed – and that's very, very dangerous, because it means I can't be sure of what I can or cannot change." He gave them a rather bewildered look: "I'm like any of you humans right now. Blundering about, but somehow getting it right… most of the time. I'm living like a human."

He sounded dazed and Rose couldn't help but smirk: "Welcome to the club."

He scowled at her, and when she just smiled, he pouted.

"So... you'll have to work on going back to your proper universe, then? I mean. Immediately?" Harry asked hesitantly.

"Oh, no, no, no!" exclaimed the Doctor cheerfully. "I promised you a trip, didn't I? Wouldn't do to break my word!

He jumped up and suddenly was all manic energy again, sprinting off to the console room, everybody else in tow.

He danced around it, pulling a few levers, brushed his fingers along the crystal of the column once before letting his hand drop to the edge of the console, where it rested comfortably.

"So, where to?" He grinned widely. "Backward or forward?"

"Won't it be dangerous?" asked Rose hesitantly. "I mean, if you're unsure about what we can meddle with and..."

"We aren't going to meddle! Just observe. Bit of a vacation, eh?"

She bit her lower lip viciously and he softened. "It'll be alright." He shrugged. "I need to get a feel for this universe anyway, if we want to have a hope to go back to ours; might as well have fun while we're at it."

He smiled contagiously and bounced a little, demanding: "So? So? Past, future, Earth, elsewhere...?"

Suddenly faced with the actuality of a choice, the three magic-users became bashful. They exchanged hesitant looks.

"Anywhere?"

"Anywhere!"

"Did we mention that it also travels in time?" added Rose, eyes sparkling – and she and the Doctor shared a warm, complicit look at the shared memory.

Ron rolled his eyes, still sulking: "Yes, you did."

"Fine, then. The Napoleonic Wars," shrugged Hermione, who'd just finished an extremely interesting historical reconstruction by one of her favourite authors.

Harry and Ron immediately protested, but the Doctor was already dancing around the console with contagious enthusiasm. "Ah! Napoleon! Now that's an interesting man, if I ever met one! And anything but small, whatever your books say. I was so jealous of Ian and Barbara when they got to meet him and I didn't. Of course, I went back later on. I must say, however, I liked Nelson a good deal more. Good friend of mine, Horatio..."

The Tardis lurched violently and started shaking, derailing the Doctor's rambling as he was too busy holding onto the lever he needed to pull. "Rose, hold that button down!"

"The blue one or the gold one?"

"Both!"

Unlike the day before, the Time Rotor wasn't pumping rhythmically. Instead, it was jerking and twitching erratically; its gentle vibration turned into a mechanical screech and a series of violent jolts tossed the three magic-users into the wall of the console room.

Rose and the Doctor didn't seem too worried, though. They were somehow managing to remain at the controls, and more or less upright, and were pushing and pulling and laughing the whole time.

"Mad. The whole of you. Mad, I tell you!" grumbled Ron, holding onto a coral trunk for dear life.

Another fierce lurch tore cries from all of them (though the Doctor's was more of a whoop) and threw them violently towards the door, before the wheezing sound of materialization announced their arrival, with the accompaniment of a series of jerks and shakes that only slowly tapered off.

The Doctor grabbed his coat with a hand and Rose with the other, half-running to the door with his typical, manic enthusiasm, while the three magic-users picked themselves up amidst grumbles.

The moment he opened the door, a cacophony of sounds exploded in their ears. Cannon booms and deafening explosions dotted by slow rifle fire and the swooshing of things through air; cries and shouts and bellows and screams blaring with almost physical force. The smell of gun smoke and blood and human sweat and reptiles drifted in.

"It's a battle!" yelled Harry in shock and dismay.

The Doctor was peering out of the doors of the Tardis, but didn't look too worried. "Oh. I think I may have got the flight a bit wrong."

"You mean this isn't the Napoleonic Wars?"

Irritated by the rough trip and unsettled by the memories of Death Eaters in Hogwarts that the noise was calling up, Hermione had the mocking tone of someone who had known this was just a trick and hadn't expected any better from the fraud, but still managed to be disappointed anyway.

"It's a war alright," grumbled Ron darkly, making his way to the door too.

The Doctor, however, turned to them with an unsettling grin: "Of course this is the Napoleonic Wars! Only... better!"

"How come?" asked Harry, sceptical, at the same time as Rose said in a deeply distrustful tone: "Define 'better'."

The Doctor's alien grin became, if possible, even wider: "It's Napoleonic Wars with DRAGONS!"


	7. It won't be safe

**_It won't be safe,_**

_The Doctor's alien grin became, if possible, even wider: "It's Napoleonic Wars with DRAGONS!"_

As soon as he said the word 'dragon', a massive shadow flew over them, winds being raised in its wake and battering their hair and clothes every which way. Looking up, their jaws fell at the majestic sight…

The enormous bulk of the beast flew effortlessly through the smoke-filled air, moving against the blue, blue sky and the blaring flashes of explosions in slow, powerful dives and soars; looking almost black from the ground, but now and then letting them glimpse the dark, metallic lustre of its copper-red scales catching the light. With a start, they realized that the sun was also glinting off the metal of guns and rifles – and the sturdy hooks of harnesses.

"But… but… but… They're riding it!" shouted Ron in horror and admiration both.

The Doctor and Rose were watching with delighted grins.

A particularly loud explosion landed so close that speckles of dirt flew almost to their feet and the three wizards choked down screams.

"Hold on, let's try and get ourselves out of the line of fire," said the Doctor, herding them back into the Tardis without much concern.

"Best idea you've had all day," said Ron vehemently.

They closed the doors hastily while he inputted new coordinates: "Just a little lateral shift... if we go to the top of that cliff we should be able to see the battle clearly."

Harry lunged at him and wrenched him away from the controls, prompting a scowl from the Time Lord. "Why would you want to see a bloody battle?" cried the wizard, alarmed. "I say let's get the hell away!"

"Oh, come on, this is brilliant!" coaxed the Doctor cheerfully. He materialized the Tardis without taking his eyes off Harry and immediately started walking backward towards the doors, extremely proud of himself. "Napoleonic battles fought with a squadron of dragons. It's like history and fantasy meshed together! This is what I travel for!"

He looked quite put-out at the incredulous looks he was receiving. Luckily, Rose was there to grip his hand and share his grin. "Fantastic, huh?" she smirked.

"Yup!" he cheered. She really was the best.

Of course, his driving was often as bad as general consensus declared it (not that he'd ever admit it): when they stepped out of the Tardis again, they were hit by an almost solid wall of steam that rapidly covered their clothes and skin with a hot, humid layer of condensing water.

No sign of the battle, or even of the site of the battle, were to be found.

"Middle of the night," muttered the Doctor automatically, starting to wade through the steam with wide, slashing motions of his arms.

The mist was just shy of being too hot and so thick they could barely see past arm's length.

"It's a sauna!" exclaimed Hermione, cautiously following him.

"Oh, yeah! Isn't it brilliant?" the Doctor tried to cheer them up. "Don't you just feel your muscles relaxing? The pores of your skin breathing better? Your mind unwinding from all its stress? It's luxurious, is what it is. People of all species love a good spa!"

"I'd appreciate it more if I weren't completely soaked!" grumbled Rose in reply.

A buzzing sound, carried easily in the mist, heralded the fact that the Doctor had found the metal door on the nearest wall. A gust of hot, wet air puffed out when he opened it and steamed in the relative cold of the corridor beyond, which led to a stairway shrouded in darkness.

"What do you think those are?" came Ron's voice from somewhere in the opposite direction. It had a tone halfway between curious and dreading.

The cold of the corridor was slowly drawing the steam out of the room, letting the wavering image appear, through the white puffs and billows, of a tiled area with benches that morphed gracefully into a cavernous room beyond; this one was even warmer, but drier, and a long, shallow pool ran very nearly its full length.

What had caught the wizard's attention were the deep niches built into the long wall at regular intervals and protected by a fence of wrought-iron, which the light of several conjured torches was illuminating. Perhaps half were empty, but the others were padded with fabric, and each held a single, massive egg.

"Oh, no," said Hermione with dread, making her way towards him. "Oh, no, no, no!"

"Are they… are they really…" Rose's eyes were wide with wonder.

"Dragon eggs!" nodded Harry happily. "Not any breed I recognize, though."

"Brilliant!" exclaimed the Doctor, running up and down the room to examine them more closely. "Oh, look at you, you gorgeous things!"

Rose got close to the nearest one, observing it in fascination. She didn't dare touch it, though. A _dragon egg_... Stuff of legends indeed!

"This is quite ingenious!" cried the Doctor happily. "See, this room, the whole baths… this is how they keep the eggs warm! Obviously they can't let the dragons brood over them, what with the war and everything, but the hot springs and the sauna set-up work quite well, I'd say. It's almost as good as burying them near a volcano – especially since I doubt there's any volcano nearby…"

He wandered off, babbling some more about hydraulics and thermal transmission. He was positively fascinated with the system.

"Where are we?" asked Hermione, full of wonder.

"Dunno," shrugged Rose. "Doctor?" When he didn't answer, she raised her voice: "Doctor!"

"What?" he started, frazzled.

"Where are we?" she asked again, patiently.

"Hard to say..." replied the Doctor happily, making his way casually back to her, hands in his pockets. "It looks like an official hatching site. I could tell you more if we were out on the surface, but as it is... We'll have to find some of the locals. Which… might not be easy – middle of the night, as I mentioned. Doubt they'll be happy to be woken up by a security breach…"

"Security breach?" squeaked Hermione.

"Well, there's a war going on," explained Rose sagely. "And we've seen dragons fight. Place like this, where more dragons are made? Bound to be under heavy security!"

"Yeah, and we got in by rather unexplainable means, given the times. So let's not give them any reason to throw us in jail, eh?"

Rose snorted. The likelihood of that…!

"Let's all be very, very polite and – and _not French_," said the Doctor, "and most of all – _don't touch anything!_"

...But of course it was too late.

Ron and Harry had started off by commenting on the eggs and comparing them to their own experiences (Ron had visited Charlie in Romania once, and Harry had come up close to a nest of Hungarian Horntail eggs, and both remembered Norbert... that is, Norberta…) but their comments had escalated to jokes, and then to dares, and before the more sensible members of their party noticed, they'd vanished some of the railings to 'check' the eggs.

Ron was speculating about breed, having so far fancied himself a bit of an expert, at least in comparison to his best friends, and not liking how the colours of the eggs baffled him.

Harry, for his part, was running his hands curiously all over a golden-brown egg. Its sides were faintly pearlescent and spotted with flecks of pale green and wherever he touched, it gave him a faint, buzzing feeling of warm pins and needles in his hands. It was quite pleasant, actually.

Not really knowing what he was doing, he let his magic flow the same way he did when testing a wand for compatibility and the pleasant, tingling feeling intensified while small, grating sounds came from the egg.

"It's growing harder!" he exclaimed in surprise and before the Doctor's cry of warning stopped echoing in the vaulted room, a crack zigzagged on the shell with a soft sound.

He snatched his hands back. "Oops…!"

The mingled shouts of "Harry!" spanned the range from worried to disbelieving, but all shared a basis of pure exasperation.

The whole egg started rocking back and forth as everybody ran towards Harry in alarm; when he tentatively touched it again, the shell was hard and hot under his hands and taking on an almost glossy quality. It was beginning to crack more and more.

Against their better judgment, they all drew closer, wary but fascinated.

"I never imagined I would see a dragon hatching; let alone twice," murmured Hermione softly.

A furious rapping noise started up from inside against the shell, covering the comment Ron's snort had anticipated. Gasps greeted the first glimpse of a clawed wing tip poking out of a crack, and the jerky movements of what were probably talons scrabbling.

Finally, a toss of a little, clawed leg fractured the shell for good, speckling them all with tiny fragments of shell and egg-slime. The dragonet appeared, shaking itself out vigorously, and spat bits of shell in every direction, sputtering. It was still covered with the slime of the interior, and shone wet and glossy in the light of the dancing flames.

"Wow," breathed Harry, catching its attention.

"Oh, you're beautiful!" sighed the Doctor.

Curiously, the little dragon sniffed the wizard's hand, then darted a little, forked tongue out to taste it. It drew a sigh of wonder from Harry, who cautiously petted the head nuzzling his hand. The dragonet obviously liked it, judging by the deep growling noise of contentment it made.

Its body was a soft, golden colour, made warmer by the fire-light, and speckled with pale, tiger-striped markings in a bright green colour along its sides and wings. Its teardrop-shaped scales had a horny, translucent sheen.

It was, altogether, very lovely.

It experimentally fluttered out its wings, still soft and crumpled against its back.

"I'm hungry," she told Harry with adorable sternness – and it was, most definitely, a she.

"Oh, um, ah, yeah," scrambled the wizard. "Yeah, of course. Um. Err… let me transfigure you something."

"Harry!" burst out Hermione, whose tenseness was visible. "You can't transfigure food, it's the first of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfigura-"

"Yes, yes, I did take my NEWTs, remember?" the wizard interrupted, quite annoyed. "I don't mean to make it out of nothing! And food might not be conjured, but it can be summoned, transformed and increased quite easily!"

While the witch blushed, he whipped out his wand and set to work, the image of the Tardis kitchen clear enough for his overpowered _accio_ to work. He'd always been good at summoning charms – ironically enough, thanks to another dragon.

The lump of meat that came flying to them made the Doctor's eyebrows rise in shock, but Harry ignored everybody, turning instead to the dragonet and doubling the amount without effort while coaxing her to accept the raw meat.

She yipped and threw herself at it quite happily, tearing at the meat with gusto. Harry laughed. She was adorable.

"You're turning into Hagrid, you are," muttered Ron disgustedly. "You'll be giving her rum and teddybears next."

"What is a teddybear?" the dragonet piped up curiously.

Ron gaped at her like a fish and Harry burst out laughing, stroking her scales fondly and praising her like an indulging parent. He already loved her.

Deciding the topic wasn't interesting after all, the little one turned her attention to her meat once more, quickly devouring it. Then, she started looking about herself, her bright green eyes full of curiosity and intelligence.

She jumped on the nearest bench and down again and batted lightly at a dangling piece of railing with a paw, watching it curiously; slowly, she started exploring the other people around her.

Ron got a friendly bump of her head to his legs, which made him chuckle, Hermione was quickly dismissed as uninteresting and Rose's scratching her head drew a purr from her, but was tolerated only for the briefest time; when she got to the Doctor, however, she was clearly fascinated.

She reared up onto her hind legs to peer at his face more closely, looking into his gentle eyes with open fascination.

She studied the Doctor with great interest and trustingly nuzzled his hand. He cooed at her, calling her 'pretty girl', and she snapped her head up, looking him straight in the eyes, cocking her head to the side in curiosity.

Then she bounced back to Harry and jumped into his arms, almost unbalancing him. "Ooff!"

"Am I pretty?" she asked with childish seriousness.

Harry smiled: "Very pretty."

"Are you going to give me a pretty name then?" she asked excitedly. "All the voices kept talking about what are the best names. If I'm pretty, I deserve a pretty name!" she proclaimed.

"Very true," acquiesced Harry with mock-seriousness. "Let me think. Hmm…" He was a bit startled to realize that his mind was actually coming up with a blank.

"It has to be a pretty name," she insisted. "Not a boring one like Nitidus."

The Latin term sent his mind tumbling through spells, even as he commented absently: "Hmm, well, that's a boy's name, and you're a girl, so no danger."

The dragonet looked quite pleased by this and settled a little, though she still watched Harry intently and thumped her tail excitedly.

_Accio, Expelliarmus, Fidelius,_ no, no… She was female, after all… _Impedimenta_? _Hexia, Alohomora_… _Alohomora_? He turned his nose up. No. Not a spell, definitely no…

She head-butted him. "Well?"

A flower name? His mind flew to his mum, but… that wasn't a very dragonesque name, was it? A star, like in the Black family? If she was a boy dragon, he'd have been thrilled to call her Sirius, but as it was…

And then the perfect name bloomed into his mind and he grinned: "Fortuna."

She stilled, and repeated it to herself in a loud whisper: "Fortuna." Then she jumped high in the air and shouted with enthusiasm: "I'm Fortuna!"

Harry laughed and caught up in the enthusiasm, his four companions cheered.

Right about that time, a woman in servant clothes came in, saw them, dropped the cleaning supplies she was carrying and let out a bloodcurdling scream.

The Doctor tried a cheerful "Oh, hello!" but sighed in resignation when she ran out as if hungry wolves were on her heels. He rubbed his face wearily. This was becoming far too complicated…

Caught up in the wonder that was the little dragon, the three magic-users didn't pay much attention, merely laughing the woman's panic off; only Rose spotted the worried look on the Doctor's face and grabbed his hand tightly, asking quietly: "Are we in trouble?"

He smiled faintly at her: "Oh, the usual. Unless we're really, really lucky, we're about to be carted off as spies. Or executed as traitors. Or both."

Rose grimaced, but had to admit that he likely had a point.

"And we can't just take the Tardis and run, because we have to sort out Harry and… Fortuna," she sighed.

"Yup," was the Doctor's sympathetic assent. Then he turned to the other three and intimated with all the seriousness and authority he could muster (which was a lot): "Hide your magic."

With a shiver, their cheer died and they quickly stashed their wands under their sleeves and nodded seriously, not even asking why. They knew their history. Witch trials might be behind them, but the Enlightment wasn't exactly progress. It merely classed witchcraft as a mental illness, downgrading magic-users from demons and criminals to madmen – but still locking them up.

A great racket of stamping foots and shouted orders heralded the arrival of a small group of soldiers and younger boys, in white breeches and hastily thrown on bottle-green waist jackets, or just shirts. All were heavily armed and they didn't waste any time in pushing the five strangers against the walls under threat of swords and cutlasses and unstable-looking rifles.

Some of them almost dropped their weapons in shock when they caught sight of Fortuna, but soon their grip tightened and their expression hardened.

The Doctor started talking fast, as was his wont, but with the clamour of voices and weapons and boots most of it was lost.

Ron was shouting something or other, even while he was being backed against a wall.

Fortuna was upset, trying to leap off into the air and shouting: "Oh! Oh! They are attacking us! Quick, let us kill them!"

Harry was shushing her and holding her back by force as best he could and stroking her to calm her down, but it was clear that she wanted to jump on these invaders and tear them apart. He could barely keep his grip on her. Ferocious little thing.

It was chaos.

Finally, the Doctor let out a bellowing shout and in his typical, charismatic way, instead of being instantly shot by all the high-strung soldiers around them, he managed to get actual silence, imposing himself over the pandemonium with no apparent effort.

Then he beamed maniacally at them all: "Terribly sorry to intrude, but if I'm correct, and I usually am with these sorts of things, then this is all a terrible misunderstanding!"

He ignored the snorts this elicited and went on at high speed.

"See, we were just passing by, no plans of staying long whatsoever, and the little one decided it was time to come out and see the world, can't blame her, really, there's so much to see and do, after all, wouldn't you want to start ASAP? That's right, you would! So you see, perfectly understandable, bit of a mishap, sure, but nothing to worry about, no harm done and all, right."

A willowy boy with huge light brown eyes repeated, aghast: "You _were just passing by_ a covert of the Aerial Corps?"

"They're French thieves!" yelled someone, and instantly the cry was taken up by half a dozen voices. "Spies! Robbers!"

"Oi! Watch who you're calling a French!" growled Rose, her accent coming out more strongly than usual.

"My Captain isn't a spy!" cried Fortuna from Harry's arms, quite indignant. "How dare you! Come here – I'll bite you!"

This seemed to give them pause. Some fidgeted a little, unsure, and hissed murmurs broke all around, hostile and perplexed at once.

Finally a tall fellow muttered loudly: "Never heard a French sound as if they were Cockneys!" which provoked a scattering of laughs from the younger ones in the group.

A short but heavy-set woman wearing golden epaulettes on the shoulders of her open, bottle-green coat, who had remained quiet and watched matters unfold with scarily intense eyes, stepped forth and made an effort to gain control of the situation. She had fine, blondish hair and a rather prominent nose, and when she waved her right hand about, they could spot burn scarring all over it.

"I suppose, if you were thieves you wouldn't be this obnoxious... you'd be more concerned with smuggling away your prize," she said thoughtfully, "and you do sound like Londoners."

"I sound like a Londoner 'cause I'm a Londoner," snapped Rose, feigning offence.

Heavy sighs burst forth from practically everyone present, not all of them of relief, but most weapons were lowered or outright put away.

"Alright, so you aren't spies, or thieves. Just who the hell are you, then? And what do you think you're doing, in a secret, high security location, property of the Aerial Corps?"

"We... were curious of your wondrous baths?" tried Harry hopefully.

A flat glare was aimed at him with deadly fury.

Harry grimaced apologetically: "I'm quite awful at spur-of-the-moment lies," he muttered softly to Rose.

The blonde smiled weakly: "Oh well. It was worth a try," she whispered.

Luckily, they didn't depend on Harry's lying skills. Undaunted by the suspicious glares, the Doctor whipped out his psychic paper (the spare one, as he seemed to have misplaced the other somehow) and rattled off authoritatively: "We're building inspectors appointed by His Royal Majesty to the task of evaluating the possibility of a complete overhaul of the hydraulic system in this compound."

Quickly jumping on the bandwagon, Rose straightened and said severely: "Yes. Quite. We're here on very important official – err, inspecting." She sniffed haughtily: "Why was there no-one here to welcome us?"

The soldiers gaped at her.

"Or at the very least some guards..." added Ron sensibly. "I mean, shouldn't the eggs be monitored at all times?"

"Quite. This smacks of slothfulness. Are you the official in charge?" put in Hermione in a severe tone that gave her best friends a little flashback of Professor McGonagall's stern looks.

Looking a little taken aback, the woman said: "I'm Captain Moreton, on Salvius. I'm the senior Captain currently here, so I suppose..." She shook her head as if to clear it, frowning at the Doctor's paper. "This actually looks in order," she murmured, perplexed.

"More in order than your guarding roster, I'd say," huffed Rose, provoking angrily muttered comments from half the presents. "What if the dragonet had hatched without anyone noticing?"

Captain Moreton grimaced, handing the psychic paper back to the Doctor, and straightened her spine proudly: "Normally, everybody is in and out of the baths quite often, so it's easy to keep an eye on the eggs and take action as soon as one of them begins to look a bit hard, indicating that it's ready to hatch," she explained tiredly. "Not that it always works," she added ruefully, gesturing to Harry and Fortuna.

The dragonet growled at her, but was ignored.

"Why was there no-one here tonight, then?" asked Hermione sensibly. "It seems to me, you should have been monitoring them all the time!"

One of the burliest men there half-yelled, bristling in defensiveness: "It's the middle of the night! We only stay with the eggs all day and night long when one shows signs of hardening. As none of them did... and that one, in particular, shouldn't have been ready for another year at least."

Harry clutched the dragonet worriedly: "Does this mean she's premature? Is she going to have troubles? Should I have her looked over by a vet?"

"A what?"

"A... doctor who specializes in the care of dragons," supplied the Doctor, who was more experienced with cross-temporal adaptation of lexicon.

"Ah, a dragon surgeon," nodded Captain Moreton. "Well, you'll have to regardless, but she won't be having any problems. Once an egg is ready, it's ready, and that's that. No accelerating the hatching, no stopping when it's time."

"Aye, lad. Dragon egg hatchin' is quite unpredictable 'til the very end; even knowin' the species we c'n only narrow the process down to a span of months or, f'r the larger breeds, years," added a short, broad-shouldered red-head from the side, smiling at the time travellers more amicably than the rest of his company.

"Maximus grounded his intended Captain for years," volunteered an excitable boy who couldn't be more than fourteen. "Berkley was quite discouraged."

Captain Moreton nodded: "While I, on the other hand, was dragged down to the baths at the crack of dawn a good five months before I expected it," she added wryly. "But there's nothing to it. The hardening is the only warning we get, so all we can do is make the best of it."

"It's strange, though," commented a couple others. "There was no indication that it was starting to harden! None at all!"

Harry had a private suspicion that his magic had had something to do with it, but kept his counsel. He merely smiled down at the dragonet in his arms, who was wriggling and asking anxiously: "Are they talking about me? Well? Are they?"

Ron didn't bother hiding his poor opinion of the locals: "There should still have been a guard."

"Yes," Captain Harcourt sighed. "But we've had some rough few months and are all tired beyond words and when news of the victory down on the Channel came, we were so exhilarated... really, we slacked off. There's no excuse, and now we'll pay the price of our laziness."

She looked wearily at Harry and Fortuna. "This is a right pickle we're in."

"Well, you can't blame us," muttered Harry, feeling defensive. His arms tightened around little Fortuna, who was darting her eyes here and there and everywhere in great interest, but obviously wasn't understanding much of what was going on.

"You aren't supposed to be here!" yelled the burly man again.

"Of course we are, it says so right here!" retorted the Doctor, waving the psychic paper madly again.

"Barten, please." Captain Moreton raised a hand wearily to calm her irascible companion down, but he paid her no mind: "We weren't notified!" he shouted.

"Well of course you weren't! If you were warned in advance, then it wouldn't be a proper inspection, would it?" said the Doctor triumphantly.

"You could hide all sorts of skeletons in your cupboards…" said Rose virtuously.

She garnered weird looks at that and someone who sounded very young whispered loudly: "Why would anyone put skeletons in cupboards?"

The Doctor managed to stifle his chuckle and maintained his stern frown, matching Captain Moreton's glare with a mild one of his own.

Giving up, the woman sighed tiredly: "Well, at least you're all British: I suppose that's something."

"They could be traitors!" shouted the hot-tempered Barten in surly protest.

"Ah, but we're not," replied the Doctor, as smug as if he'd won a logic contest.

"Whatever you are, we're stuck with the situation now," said Captain Moreton with a gruff glare. She favoured Harry with a disgusted grimace: "I suppose we'll have to train you up."

She turned to the heavy-set, friendly red-head, ignoring Harry's sputtered protests unconcernedly. "What do you think will be their most likely assignation?"

The man scratched his chin thoughtfully: "Dunno 'bout that. Yellow Reapers c'n be quite clannish, an' prefer to work wi' other of their own breed, but the Malachites are less fussy 'bout that, and Anglewings are quite happy to fly in formation, and she's a cross o' both. Yeah, ye'll prob'ly be put in a formation, lad. Soon as we get ye trai'd up a bit."

Harry dropped Fortuna, who yelped loudly: "What? But I can't stay here! I have people waiting for me at home and - and I've already fought in a war, thank you very much, I have no interest in being embroiled in another!"

Captain Moreton raised an eyebrow: "And you think you have a choice, lad? You're a Captain in His Majesty's Aerial Corps, now. You'll do your duty to your country and that's that."

"And if he doesn't?" asked Ron with an unfriendly glare.

The woman went cold-eyed: "We're in times of war. Deserters get executed."

There was a very uncomfortable silence after that.

It was broken by Fortuna, who'd wandered up to the red-faced Barten and was eyeing him with unfriendliness. She turned her head to look at Harry and asked innocently: "Can I bite him?"

Everybody chuckled and some of the tension started to slowly dissipate, as they watched in amusement Harry's attempt to explain why the fierce little dragonet shouldn't bite anyone, no, not even if they're mean and yell a lot.

Tentatively at first, conversations started up around Harry and Fortuna's situation; soon Hermione was bombarding the soldiers – or rather, the _aviators_ – with questions, but her bossy and overly-eager manners weren't winning her any sympathy from the irritated and overwhelmed group. Rose, on the other hand, had a friendly way of asking questions that meant she quickly had a group of boys and girls her age and younger chatting excitedly at her.

"We think the Anglewing over there may hatch soon; that would be famous," one of them said longingly. "And the reddish one over there was expected to hatch two months ago already! Poor Mayes has been grounded the whole time…"

"Don't know what he complains about – he'll get to fly soon enough, and with his own dragon to boot," grumbled a few others.

All of the aviators who didn't wear the golden epaulettes of captainship already looked at the eggs with wistful expressions; they also shot Harry ugly looks of jealousy and envy that had Ron fingering his hidden wand in nervousness. His best friend, however, was much too distracted with cooing at the baby dragon to notice.

The only silent one was, strangely enough, the Doctor. He had his hands firmly plunged in his trousers pockets and was contemplating Fortuna with deep concentration, mind running a million miles per minute.

After a while, he reached a decision and wandered up to the green-eyed wizard, nodding to himself.

"Ah… Harry?" he said cautiously.

He grabbed the young man by an arm and dragged him a little while away, throwing a charming grin back at the baffled (and some, grim-looking) glares the aviators who'd been talking to Harry directed at him. "Just a little private word with him, won't be a minute!" he said reassuringly.

As soon as they were out of hearing range, he turned to the wizard with utmost seriousness: "Harry, you should consider staying like they want-"

"What?!" Harry yelped.

"-for the time being," hissed the Doctor meaningfully. "I could spirit you away at once, no problem, but what about Fortuna? Are you going to leave her here?"

They turned to glance at the dragonet, who was practically purring under Ron's stroking hands. Harry felt a stab of panic at the mere idea of being separated from her.

"Didn't think so," stressed the Doctor grimly. "Look, I'm not saying you should stay to fight – Rassilon knows I will never, _ever_ push anyone to join a war, not under any circumstances – but you need to learn how to look after her and these people are the experts…"

Harry darted his green eyes from the dragonet to the Time Lord and back. He licked his suddenly dry lips a couple times: "I'm never going back, am I?"

"What? Of course you are," said the Doctor, genuinely surprised. "I merely meant that you should stay until she's grown up, at least a little; enough for you to learn how to best care for her. That's all!"

"Yeah, yeah, but it doesn't matter," sighed Harry heavily. "She'll grow alright. She's a dragon! What do you think my people will do to her? In my world, dragons are kept in preserves. Penned in like... like animals! They won't care that she's intelligent – or worse, they will care, and section her away in the DoM to, to experiment or... and I'll never see her again!" His voice rose with his upset.

"Ah..." The Doctor rubbed his left ear pensively. "Right. That's a problem." Then he perked up: "What if you kept her a secret?"

Harry smiled without cheer: "Oh, sure. Big scaly dragon... that bloke said she'll probably reach 15 tonnes! And she's got a fighter personality to boot. Of course I'll be able to hide her in the garden shed!" he said sarcastically. He shook his head and said bitterly: "No, it's here or... or leaving her – and that's not an option. Not for me."

He moved away, looking glum, and Ron and Hermione quickly joined him in a little tight group, apart from everyone else, confabbing furiously.

The Doctor however wasn't put out. He followed him and slapped his shoulder familiarly, grinning madly: "I have just the solution for you!"

He marched off, grabbing Rose's hand on his way and leaving a bunch of bewildered people behind. "Don't go anywhere!" he shouted cheerily over his shoulder.

"Doctor?" asked Rose, baffled by the way he was dragging her away. "What, exactly, are we doing?"

Most of the aviators followed them and cried out in shock at spotting the Tardis. They all gathered around the incongruous blue box and started flinging bewildered questions – ranging from 'Where did that come from?' to 'What the hell is a police box anyway?'. The Doctor didn't bother answering any of them; he simply pushed Rose inside and followed, leaning out of the doors with a cheerful grin to wave at the assembled aviators: "Right. Don't go anywhere, ok? We'll... be right back."

"What do you mean, you'll be right back?" shouted Hermione shrilly. She elbowed her way forward through the complaining aviators. "Where do you think you're going? Doctor? Doctor!"

"Not to worry!" came the hasty and far too cheerful reply. "I'll just go pick something up sixty thousand years from now, really quick. Something important – which I really, really hope will have been invented because, come to think of it, there's no guarantee that this universe will produce it, but why borrow troubles? I'm sure I will find what I need, well, what Harry needs, really. And then I'll come back for you. Be prepared!"

"DOCTOR!"


End file.
